Kacey Musgraves - 2013 Anticipation

there's an occasional clunky line but man this just /sounds/ so good

I know I'll warm up to it sometime this week.

kinda interesting to imagine how thos would've been received if this was the follow up to "STDP" instead of "PM"

also been noticing a general trend of people having kinda "slept on" or overlooked "PM" upon release and only giving it a fair listen now, interestingly.

feel like - from a Building a Career Arc Narrative pov - it was a bit of a wrong move to follow up "STDP" with it. that said, i am one of the late comers to appreciating it, so i am clearly biased.

i always felt the 'PM' was way underappreciated. it's almost as good as 'STDP'.

maybe i am just excited but i feel like this sounds pretty much perfect

i don't normally post my writing on ilx but for fans of this record i think there's some good stuff in here about how it came together https://www.spin.com/featured/kacey-musgraves-golden-hour-march-2018-cover-story/

lots of good stuff, thanks!

can't wait to read that piece today, thanks j0rd

it's excellent!

it nails the oddness of shopping at any Walgreens that isn't your own.

I enjoyed that article also, thanks J0rd. Was "Grand Folks" a typo? A good one if so.

hahaha. yes... i'm gonna fix that, thanks

i need to spend more time with this to fully process it but for now it's safe to say "slow burn" is one of the most hauntingly gorgeous songs i've heard in ages

Yeah, just saw her play that on Colbert and wow

oh this record is so painfully sweetly good, i don't know if i can stand to listen to it all year

has anyone written a piece comparing this to the new frankie cosmos

I gave this a once-through today and it was nice. Nicer than I remember her other records being, anyway. And then I got stuck on "Rainbow" at the end of the album because there's part of the chorus melody that's a direct rip from Survivor's "The Search Is Over" and that made me ridiculously happy.

I'm really blown away by this album, the songs are great and the production is truly perfect, so rich and gorgeous and airy. one of the best sounding albums I've ever heard

Her performance on Colbert made me an instant fan so I'll probably just buy this as soon as I see it, hope I'm not disappointed

this is a silly comparison but Slow Burn makes me think of Sufjan covering Bittersweet Symphony

NO SHADE TO HER BUT LOL 🤣 pic.twitter.com/N5TpJdQhUF

— K A C E Y M U S G R A V E S (@KaceyMusgraves) March 31, 2018

heh, I guess she does her own twitter

the tempos alongside the beats connect this album to pop r&b to me: like, you could go from "I Feel It Coming" to "Oh, What A World" on the radio & it would sound natural. It's a different way to link to pop than like Luke Bryan where it's his singing that has rap cadences. Here Musgraves sings like she's always done but the beats make it sound like Miguel. I'd love to see those two tour together.

I'm not feeling this album much at all. It sounds canned, a buncha expensive demos with little evidence of a band approach (I couldn't figure out until I got to the guitar solo in "Velvet Elvis" – I was relieved!). Musgraves' vocals get monotonous after a while – not much variety.

oh well. on first listen I think it's delightful.

I like hearing how country artists going pop these days keep the banjos as a mark that this is country. Swift did this until 1989. This album is more like Fearless than Speak Now in terms of its progression outside of country. I'd like this to be a pop hit but being a country hit seems likely to me.

Swift did this until 1989.

This has been pretty par for the course since peak country pop c. Garth Brooks and Shania Twain, who lest one forget released three different versions of "Up!' in 2002, one "country," one "pop" and one "international."

what was the deleted tweet?

i think i agree w alfred to an extent -- besides "lonely weekend" and "high horse" there's not enough done w/in the rigidity of most the songs. i can hear the sade influence; it sounds like she was listening a lot to lovers rock, which funnily enough is my favorite sade album

i love those two tracks though

xp to katherine, it was the dude looking away from girl 1 to girl 2 meme, with emotion as the first and the musgraves album as the second

the dude being "gays"

i love those two tracks though

― lowercase (eric),

same

glad the backlash has finally arrived (not here per se, in general) for this good album

its weird that it wasn't really there for her less-good last album lol but also makes a lot of sense, im super tired of the jaded knowingness of ppl with no taste though

ppl say its a new carly rae jepsen unless it takes off, thing to me is this is much better than carly, i mean you could easily have said that about the second rae sremmurd when it first dropped, shit didn't do well sales-wise until black beatles took off virally a few months later

plenty of ppl openly talked about how they were somewhat disappointed by her last album

idk why the carly comparisons are coming up, silly meme she tweeted aside. is p4k reviewing the album the tipping point into this territory?

she doesn't have a 'hit' like she did on the first album, but its not like that radio hit was 'call me maybe' lol ppl always liked her as an album artist

re deej: in order for there to be backlash, there needs to be a coherent media/hype narrative of "this is capital-Q Quality" to backlash against. that just wasn't there for pageant material, which everyone seemed to implicitly agree was good but not tastemaker crossover/premature "is this a classic?"-level good.

sure. but it also shows the irony of a 'backlash' which is that its less about quality than abt people's annoyance with the behavior of their peers lol

i don't disagree with that. my main takeaway from backlash culture is that it indicates a protectiveness concerning genre artists who make Very Good albums, and the tendency to then describe those artists as somehow "above" or apart from the genre they emerge from.

yeah thats dumb as hell, i think there's a reason i like kacey but dont spend a lot of time on country typically, but i def don't think its that she's better at country as much as she's better at things i like in pop songwriting

which is a totally valid reason! but also a distinction that a lot of ppl don't make, and one that kacey honestly has kinda dragged herself into, considering her twitter's been retweeting a bunch of the "i hate country -> new kacey comes on holy shit" memes as of late

haha ><

She's been doing a lot of woodshedding as an opening act, from the usual country pop suspects to Katy Perry. I assume she took advantage of the range of audiences to test out her new stuff, to see where she wants to go. I can't imagine her a standard issue huge country star, but I'm not exactly sure where she's going, either.

this is a good album, and not that it matters but it sounds the least country out of all her releases to my ears

quite different from same trailer different park at least

I like High Horse as a single but the sound of it is too sweet and upbeat to work with those “fuck you” lyrics imho.

I immediately liked this better than Pageant Material, but still sounds hella country to me. You can’t take the country out of that voice.

Lyrics still seem a little bland compared to the first record though.

Yes, it doesn’t seem to have much / any of the wit and sharpness that her first two records, and material for other singers, usually had.

Agreed. I thought she overdid the cleverness on PM at times, now I think she's gone too far in the other direction

I guess I'm just an asshole