7.3/10
Favorite Track: "Love is a Wild Thing" Least Favorite Track: "Slow Burn"
Golden Hour is a completely new sound for Kacey Musgraves. In an interview with Rolling Stone Kacey described her new sound as “trippy” and I couldn’t agree more. Opposed to the light-hearted and simple-minded themes and country anthems we have gotten used to hearing from Musgraves, her new Grammy winning LP brings us a new, ethereal, and psychedelic take on her more traditional country sound. With a new sound comes new influences and Kacey has switched completely in the department of where she draws inspiration from. Thematically, Golden Hour is also heavier than anything Kacey has tackled thus far. Opposed to her usual themes of southern living and life in a rural southern town, on this LP Kacey takes on themes such as, Loneliness, Soiled relations with family members, and the inability to remain happy with oneself. The trippy production style translates into tracks like “Mother” which Kacey recounts was literally written in the midst of an LSD trip. “Mother” is the shortest track on the record but it might just be the most meaningful. The track recounts dealing and managing relationships as one progresses in fame and stature and struggling to maintain the kind of close-knit relationships one might wish to have with their close family members. This song alone has so many more dimensions than anything Kacey has really released prior, and is a good testament to the rest of the record. Her sound is far more mature on Golden Hour than it is on any of her other projects. It’s even apparent in details such as the arrangement of the tracks on this record. It seemed as if prior to this LP Kacey was rather set with using a more traditional song structure consisting of a simple verse-chorus-verse type pattern, but on Golden Hour Kacey seems much quicker to throw in different tempo sections, pre-choruses, and overall more flavor in her song structure. I’m not going to sit here and act like Kacey is reinventing country music or anything of the sort, because she isn’t. I simply think her fusion of country-pop is a lot more interesting than many of her contemporaries. Its spacier, more grabbing, and overall Golden Hour is an elegant and well produced album.