The 50 best albums of 2018, No 8 - Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour

The Guardian 0

The country artist’s acid-enhanced fourth album sparkled with magical melodies that felt like they had been around for years

• Best albums of 2018
• Best culture of 2018
  

LSD and music are old bedfellows. You can hear the drug’s perspective-expanding effects on rock bands ranging from the Beatles to Tame Impala, while the word acid got added to house to help describe the psychedelic weirdness of the squiggling basslines made by the Roland TR-303. It is even a favourite descriptive shortcut for lazy music journalists who say that one band sounds like another, but “on acid”.

But Kacey Musgraves, who took LSD while writing her fourth album, Golden Hour, seems to use it less to burn down the doors of perception with a rainbow-spurting flamethrower and more to lightly expand her creativity, like the Silicon Valley execs given to microdosing. What resulted were not endless wig outs and lyrics about riding the snake to the ancient lake, but 13 excellent songs characterised by crystalline emotional and melodic clarity.

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