Watch out Taylor ...cowgirl Kacey’s coming to get ya! Adrian Thrills
KACeY MuSgRAveS has never been one of country music’s shrinking violets. The Texan is enough of a rhinestone cowgirl to be embraced by Nashville, but she hasn’t been afraid to ruffle feathers along the way.
Her 2015 album pageant Material picked away at the not-so-wholesome underbelly of small-town life.
She also broke with Music City tradition by using an earlier single, Follow Your Arrow, to voice her support for same-sex relationships.
She’s refusing to play safe here, too, moving away from pure country to a more contemporary fusion that places her firmly in the middle ground occupied by Taylor Swift and Carrie underwood.
Musgraves admits she approached this fourth major album with ‘a different mindset’. The singer, 29, hinted at a more versatile sound on her 2016 Christmas record, but goes much further here, with Daniel Tashian, singer with The Silver Seas, an important presence alongside co-producer Ian Fitchuk.
With Tashian’s penchant for harmony-driven rock a key pointer, there are nods to the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac. More surprisingly, there are also forays into disco and electronic music.
Kacey’s recent marriage to musician boyfriend Ruston Kelly has prompted several romantic interludes, but the sharp-witted singer-songwriter hasn’t lost her acerbic edge. She opens with a song saluting the joys of taking it easy. Fuelled by strummed guitars, strings and synth washes that echo Zero 7 and Morcheeba, Slow Burn is a deceptively low-key start: ‘I’m gonna do it my way,’ she sighs, marking our cards for what’s to follow.
Musical impetus builds from there. Lonely Weekend evokes Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac and Oh, What A World embraces dance. High Horse pushes Musgraves even further away from country by incorporating pulsating disco beats.
Of the romantic numbers, Butterflies is pithy in the style of early Taylor Swift and Love Is A Wild Thing is a countryrocker worthy of Sheryl Crow.
DeSpITe her newfound domestic bliss, she avoids any smugness. She also admits to over-thinking things on the bittersweet Happy & Sad: ‘I’m the kind of person who starts getting kind of nervous when I’m having the time of my life.’
elsewhere, she turns the tables on roving rock Romeos on the excellent Space Cowboy — as in ‘you can have your space, cowboy’ — and is even more cutting on Wonder Woman, putting a gloss on her sarcasm by adding glistening guitars and a gorgeous pop melody.
‘You can take me out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of me,’ she sang three years ago on pageant Material. The country still lingers a little here, but there’s a lot more besides.
AS MuSgRAveS goes pop, Kylie Minogue is moving the other way on her first collection of new songs in four years.
Arriving a month shy of her 50th birthday, golden sees the Aussie tone down the disco for more acoustic-based songs written in Nashville with new collaborators Steve Mcewan and Amy Wadge.
Kylie said this week she had to rebuild herself ‘physically and mentally’ after splitting from fiance Joshua Sasse last year, and the repercussions can be heard here. She addresses her heartache on A Lifetime To Repair, admitting her hopes of settling down are over because ‘Cupid don’t love me like he used to do’.
Recent single Dancing, which initially sounded like a celebration of tripping the light fantastic, ultimately reveals itself as a song about confronting mortality and going out with a flourish ‘when the final curtain calls’.
Kylie doesn’t abandon her pop instincts entirely. The presence of production stalwarts who have worked with Adele (eg White) and the Spice girls (Biff Stannard) sees to that, though there are moments when her vocal limitations are exposed by the album’s stripped-down instrumentation.
But the change of musical scenery — ‘Dolly parton on the dancefloor,’ as she calls it — has given Kylie a timely, Tennesseepowered boost.