Kacey Musgraves — Golden Hour ANALYSIS & REVIEW

Published 04/04/2018

Just to get this out of the way and hop off my high horse (no pun intended) about this subject, today’s musical genre categories are pointless and detrimental, and this album easily proves it. Now to discuss the music. The best way I can describe my immediate reaction to this is nostalgic bliss, as the carefully crafted simplicity of these overall musical techniques reached a level of purity and delight that hasn’t been tapped into consistently since the late 1990’s–early 2000’s. Being this delicate in terms of the lack of dynamically featured instruments and sameness in overall color, both sonically and harmonically, is quite difficult to pull off for an impacting emotional delivery.

What makes this succeed here is mostly Musgraves’ raw talent and self-trust. There wasn’t much time or energy spent at the experimentation board; for all I know, these songs could have been written in ten minutes. They all had simple, understandable structures and obvious layering with what instruments took on what roles. What makes a lot of them quite beautiful are the small melodic motives and simple instrumental ideas, coupled with the musician’s trust that they could carry an entire song start to finish. The trust was rightly placed; melodic shape was exquisite, pulling on the listener’s emotional strings with the simplest of rises, falls, and recurring memorable choruses.

The sound was wonderfully supportive in the overall approaches and attempts at peacefulness. The spotlight was always rightfully left on the soaring melodic lines, but the background never had a dull moment of relapse or emptiness, as the soft instrumentation always carried energy with nice varying guitars and sweet decorations such as the banjo, strings, and vibraphone to further captivate. The songs “Slow Burn” and “Oh, What A World” were two timbral highlights in this regard. The piano features were also very strong and provided just enough contrast in the main sonic foundation, and raised the bar in the last song “Rainbow” with a wonderfully nuanced harmonic progression with nice twists and turns on secondary dominants that we didn’t get with just the guitar.

The harmony certainly maintained that same element of sweetness with its appropriate four chord decisions, using good non-chord tones to provide color while having an obvious and satisfying progression. The multiple phrase endings or elongations landing on the sub-dominant or some other related chord, rather than constantly circling back to tonic, was especially pleasing. Really, there’s not much to it; lots of easy, intuitive decisions that made this peaceful, unassuming atmosphere pleasurable to be in. It could be easy to call this a “guilty pleasure”, since it wasn’t really at the level of thoughtfulness and surprise and I normally like to experience, but I can’t lie to myself since I still felt a good level of attachment and can trace it to these musical techniques.

Now, there were a couple negatives, noticeably one downfall in each recognizable layer, which stopped it just short of greatness. Melody was mostly terrific, but there were a bit too many overly-obvious modern tropes used in some chorus motives, such as the seesaw of “mi” and “sol” or the unoriginal small syncopations on repeated notes, where intuition didn’t quite lock in to everything else and produce the same magical pleasantry. Also, while I said I enjoyed the variety of guitar techniques for its own sake, some of them were rather run-down and bland for long periods, like the slide guitar or the electric rhythm, which seemed to put intended style and influences over emotional atmosphere.

The harmonies had three dips on the album, “Butterflies”, Space Cowboy”, and “Velvet Elvis”, with less inspiring repetitive progressions that dragged these songs down to a more plain, unspectacular level. It’s still one of the best albums of the year so far. If your biggest interest is something new and innovative, don’t bother with this; you just may miss out on something beautiful and special. For 2018 albums, I think it’s a must-listen.