![]() ![]() ![]() The slow slip from that song’s faint space-rock vibes through the Prismizer vocal on “Oh What a World,” and the hip-hop beat anchoring “Happy & Sad” feels like watching the roadside scenery slowly change during a trip out of town, or like gradually getting rip-roaringly high. The towering disco jam “High Horse” might seem like a hard left in a discography of wispy outlaw-country tunes, but the magic of Golden Hour is that the 13-song track list patiently walks you into its experimentality, starting with “Slow Burn,” a stoned, delicate jam whose closest stylistic antecedents are Radiohead, Harvest-era Neil Young, and fedora Beck. It’s her most accomplished and her least traditional body of work to date. Musgraves’s new album Golden Hour makes mincemeat of both the trepidation about the quality of country women’s art and the fuss about them crossing over. Related StoriesĦ Best New Songs of the Week: Kacey Musgraves, Chloe x Halle, DJ Esco, Future Nashville wants its women to stay loyal but refuses to pay it forward. 1’s for playing the Travis Tritt right above the Tupac), and you get an impasse. Pair country radio’s reticence to even play songs by women - an honest heresy when you think about guys in any other genre daring to declare the same - with its secret sexual-harassment problem, and the hell these singers catch from genre purists for angling for shine from collaborations outside Music Row (while men like Sam Hunt and Florida Georgia Line rack up country airplay No. That means her singles don’t do well on country radio, the kind of place where women’s contributions are referred to by radio consultants as “ tomatoes in a salad” where the men are lettuce. Kacey, the lesbian singer-songwriter Brandy Clark, and the gay hit-maker Shane McAnally’s lyric about kissing girls and boys blew more than a few hats back.) She lives for pot and neon and Nudie suits, and she took a big risk by making a big deal about LGBTQ rights on 2013’s “Follow Your Arrow.” (Nashville is so straight-presenting that Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush,” a song about a woman so jealous of a guy’s girlfriend she maybe wants to live inside her body, could be celebrated as a groundbreaking queer anthem. Musgraves is an outlier because her politics are open, loving, and free. It’s a demure and conservative community, the kind that gasps at a low-cut neckline on an award-show red carpet and rattles sabers all night when Beyoncé and the Dixie Chicks sing a song together on national television. Somehow this tiny, impactful singer registers as something of a weirdo around the Nashville mainstream-country scene. By the time the drummer showed up, there were seven people playing onstage, but the mix was still so gossamer that a cough from the audience could’ve broken it up. ![]() The loudest moment in Musgraves’s performance of the new song “Slow Burn” last night on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert arrived when the pianist plucked out a string of sparse notes over the second verse. Musgraves and her band make quiet, pretty country music, the kind that critics like to call “breezy,” because songs rely as much on the band’s beautiful notes as the open spaces between them. Listening to her best songs - “Follow Your Arrow,” “Merry Go ’Round,” “Miserable” - feels like eavesdropping on a group of talented friends in a porch-front jam. She can bowl you over belting out big notes, but she’s every bit as commanding at a whisper. Like porcelain, Kacey Musgraves’s voice seems both sturdy and delicate at the same time. Photo: Andrew Lipovsky/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images Golden Hour makes mincemeat of the fuss about country women crossing over. ![]()
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