Review Summary: All I ever wanted was something classic
When Kacey Musgraves came up in 2013 with Grammy winning Same Trailer Different Park, she impressed by creating traditional country music that still managed to be dynamic and currently relevant. The question was how she could top herself after this, and surely enough, 2015’s Pageant Material, while still pretty great, settled with consolidating her brand of small town anecdotes, witty turn of phrases, and gender equality statements. Now, with Golden Hour, she expands her discography towards new, unexplored horizons for country music, letting in 70’s influences in order to achieve something timeless and much less contained in itself.
Slow burn sets the tone for the record, sounding like some of The Beattles' psychodelic songs, larger than life while still retaining a very earthy feel. Kacey has always been a brilliant lyricist but this level of genius is unprecedented in her career, where lines such as “Texas is hot, I can be cold, grandma cried when I pierced my nose”, set you right at the center of her life by mixing metaphor and concrete events to perfection. Throughout the album, her voice reverberates through space without ever losing direction. Lonely Weekend and Butterfly are two of the songs that feel most breazy, but while the first surprises for successfully blending the disco glitz with Musgraves’ country roots, Butterfly is a lesser version of 2015’s Late To The Party, where the songwriter celebrates a newfound romantic bliss but fails to move the listener as deeply as other tracks do. Love Is A Wild Thing is a clear album standout, an immediate Western classic that contemplates the mysteriousness of love in a more universal – but never generic – manner, definitely one of her most complex lyric choices thus far. The single Space Cowboy is another blissful blend of twang and a futuristic, cosmic production, in which the singer sets her lover free of a commitment he’s no longer interested in – certainly a refreshing statement in light of the more urgent, dramatic way women tend to be portrayed in pop music. Kacey has always thrived in her graceful, balanced approach to life’s more unpleasant moments, and it’s such a relief to see that hasn’t changed.
Velvet Elvis and Wonder Woman are the two personal favorites of mine, both dancy country songs strongly influenced by Bee Gees. High Horse is the quintessential Musgraves lyric, concerning itself with simply criticizing someone who is kinda annoying – always a fun topic but unfortunately the song gets a little spoiled by the production because there is such a thing as too disco. The closer Raibow is simply beautiful, a simple piano ballad that manages to be uplifting without causing any nausea. Overall, Golden Hour is riveting because it’s willing to explore, because it knows what works together, what’s unexpected and what’s familiar, and fans concerned about a turn away from country will surely be too busy noticing all the little turns and twists in sound and in imagery to even worry about genre.
