270. Kacey Musgraves, "Golden Hour"

 


Look, I like Kacey Musgraves.  I first got into her stuff after the release of her first major label album, Same Trailer Different Park, in 2013.  Saw her at the Fillmore on that tour; thought she was great.  I continue to enjoy her music.  I think she's got a great voice and a wry sensibility.

That being said, this album does not belong on this list and I'm not sure how it ended up here.  Don't get me wrong; it's a nice album.  There are some good songs (and some duds).  But it's not even the best Kacey Musgraves album, let alone better than Houses of the Holy or, for Chrissakes, Coal Miner's Daughter.  I don't even think Kacey Musgraves thinks that.

(I continue to be perplexed at how Coal Miner's Daughter ended up at 440 when it is so far clearly superior to a lot of other albums between here and there, but water under the bridge I guess.)

Back in the day when Jann Wenner still had day-to-day control of Rolling Stone, it was pretty much an open secret that he would manipulate the magazine's Best Of lists and reviews to help his rich and famous musician friends out, like Peter Wolf and Mick Jagger and their extremely mediocre solo albums.  I'm not saying that's what happened here, but I find it hard to believe that enough music industry voters thought "Hmmm, Golden Hour, that's definitely one of my top 50 albums" and put it down to land this record at number 270.

But let's leave all that and talk about this album on its own merits.  It's definitely a change for Musgraves, leaving behind the more-or-less straight country of Trailer and moving into a richer, more lushly produced and more experimental sound.  "Slow Burn," the opener, is lovely, a slow, pop-adjacent meditation on accepting the world as it comes.  "Butterflies" is closer to country, but richly instrumented, with a pretty, lilting chorus that really shows off Musgraves' voice.  "High Horse" is fascinating, a country/EDM/pop mashup.  You could mistake it for Carly Rae Jepsen, Musgraves' pop doppleganger.

I'm not gonna lie, though, some of the lyrics are.... not great.  "Velvet Elvis" compares, yes, a velvet Elvis painting to a new love:

You're my velvet Elvis
I ain't never gonna take you down
Making everybody jealous
When they step into my house
Soft to the touch, feels like love
Knew it as soon as I felt it
You're my velvet Elvis, baby

Not great.  "Space Cowboy" is kind of a classic country music play on words ("You can have your space/Cowboy/I ain't gonna fence you in") that either makes you smile or groan, depending on your sensibilities.  But these are not dealbreakers.  Like I said, it's a good album!  It's not 270 good, but it's good.

[LATE ADDENDUM: I just realized that this is the one-year anniversary of F2F!  That's right, the first entry, covering the eponymous Funeral, was on October 24, 2020.  We're at 270 now, which means that my original thinking that it would take a little over 2 years to do the whole list, is probably accurate unless I start doing speed or break my arm or die.  Can't wait til we get to Pet Sounds and say it shouldn't be on the list at all and make everyone SO MAD.]

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? I love you, Kacey, but no.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip hop"
Read more

3. Joni Mitchell, "Blue"

Image
  Do you want the good news or the meh news first?  The good news is that this album is better than the other Joni Mitchell albums we've seen , or at least better for me.  I hated one of them and barely tolerated the other, so I was not expecting to like this, and after three listens yesterday, it was not as bad as I'd feared it would be.  The meh news?  I still don't love Joni Mitchell and I don't particularly like this album. Obviously, since it's the number 3 out of the Top 500 albums ever made, a lot of people feel differently.  Pitchfork called it "possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made," which may be true, who knows, but if it is it's about breaking up with a whole series of dudes, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to some guy named Carey.  (In Pitchfork's estimation, this is the 86th best album of the 1970s, so not exactly in number 3 overall territory). One thing that bugs me is Joni Mitchell's voice, which I find kind of g
Read more

1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

Image
  500 albums later and we're out of albums.  This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper , which was the last album to hold that spot).  I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs.  I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time. In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is: 1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life 2. Beatles, Abbey Road 3. Nirvana, Nevermind 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours And so forth.  But let's take this album on its own merits. The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country th
Read more