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Golden Hour was ranked seventh in my Top Ten Albums I Wrote About in 2018 list, and was awarded the Sepia Snapshot for Sounding Really Nice
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Hey hey, it’s a day ending in ‘y’! It must be time for me to once again don my generalisation hat!
Here at the Ramble, we’re generally not fans of country music.
Foremost within the pantheon for across-the-board homogeneity: in texture — counter-caterwauls of banjo and fiddle abound — and in subject — men singing about whiskey and trucks while women sing about murdering their husbands (that Carrie Underwood feature still forthcoming). But more than any particular discrete musical element, what I can’t abide is the stubborn, obnoxious, pervasive American-ness of it all. It’s not even the delusion that their cap-doffing beer-swilling cattle-tipping experiences are universal, it’s a simple inability to conceive that other experiences even exist. They’re not just the centre of the galaxy. They’re the only star in the sky.
If you caught my superlatives list that I drew up at the end of last year, some of this may be ringing a bell. When I wrote about Kacey Musgraves’ lovely Pageant Material I thought I had said all I wanted to on her discography and on the genre at large, a feeling not diffused when she released her follow-up album back in March.
Beautiful and clear-eyed, and disarmingly simple, I thought to myself. I’d already done Kacey, though. And Kylie and Kimbra aren’t going to stan themselves, now are they?
But in the intervening months I’ve kept coming back to Golden Hour.
There’s something ineffable about the way Kacey’s music makes you feel. It’s not exactly joy, or the satisfaction of a well-orchestrated dénouement. It’s more like confidence. A renewed glow of trust that permeates laid-back love songs like ‘Butterflies’, and Julie-Andrews-indoor-voice rhapsodies like ‘Oh, What a World’. It’s with refreshing honesty that Kacey can shrug out a line as quietly witty as, “Baby, I ain’t Wonder Woman / I don’t know how to lasso the love out of you”.
On paper, country bingo lays itself out pretty clearly: Kacey’s sweet voice curls at the edges with a soft Southern drawl, and the rural imagery and setpieces are all present and accounted for. But the rock-steady self-assuredness underpinning celebrations and lamentations alike transmutes it all into something special.
Golden Hour is about finding the magic in the mundane. When the angle is just so and the light hits just right, the world somehow resolves itself into understanding. Kacey doesn’t have the power to solve our problems. But she has a way of articulating small shifts in perspective, little everyday choices to take life as it comes, that forms the core of this gorgeous and criminally underrated album.
[Edit: this article was written before Golden Hour won the Grammy for album of the year. As you were.]
With equal poise, Kacey punctuates a kiss-off to an ex-lover with a smirk — “Why don’t you giddy up / And ride straight out of this town / You and your high horse” — and delivers a eulogy for the inevitable end of another relationship — “Sunsets fade and love does too / […] / When a horse wants to run / There ain’t no sense in closing the gate / So you can have your space, cowboy”. These two equine-themed songs mark two emotional high points of the album; one a heartfelt ballad, the other exactly the kind of country-disco gold Kylie was aiming for, both sharing the moral of going with the grain.
Kacey haloes her elongated melodies with impeccably smooth production, silky and liquid, spangled with glints of sunlight. Some records demand your attention or require your full concentration; some even actively discourage passive listening as an artistic device. Golden Hour is more than willing to accommodate you. Dip a hand into the cool smoothness of a stream and feel where the water wants to take you.
It’s taken her three albums to get here, to learn that it’s alright not to have everything figured out just yet. We intellectualise and we overcomplicate out of a misguided perception that things have to be complex to be worthwhile. But Kacey’s doing just fine living a life of understated, underrated simplicity.
She lays out the arc of her philosophy on the album’s breathtaking opener, accompanied by little more than the delicate chiming of her guitar.
“Born in a hurry, always late /
Haven’t been early since ’88 / […] /
I’m alright with a slow burn”
You don’t have to meet Kacey halfway. She’s already there for you, suspending reality by simply observing it, as if her gentle gaze tilt-shifts everything into warm, sepia-rich contentment.
Look at the world the way Kacey does, and you’ll find how it catches the light.