Comes on Clear Cream Vinyl LP + Bonus Scented Sleeves

Here is Kacey Musgraves, welcoming back the gassy giant to remind her that some people are givers and some are takers and she’s well shot of the latter on “Deeper Well,” the title track of her sixth studio album.

The pro forma language of astrology, tarot, and therapy is all over the charts lately. These are great boons to the famous: ways for them to venture relatability without disclosure, and to make the listener feel centered in the music, too. While you, a civilian, may never know what it’s like to feel dogged by deuxmoi, I’m a Leo and so are you! On the endlessly pretty Deeper Well, Musgraves encounters energy vampires, boundaries, moon bathing, the mycelium network, the power of jade stone, and breaking patterns that no longer serve her; the song “Dinner With Friends” is a torn-out gratitude journal page. The wistful folksy vibe is very much “pottering around your local wellness shop picking up crystals and sniffing the hand-rolled palo santo incense.” Sageing my cynicism momentarily, these things seem to have genuinely helped Musgraves as a person, and all power to her. But as songwriting concerns, they wash out the erstwhile country radical’s incisiveness, her winks, her delightfully subverted cliches, and turn a beloved outsider into a solipsist. Once she’s sweetly bid “goodbye to the people that I feel are real good at wasting my time” on the second song, the world outside is all but gone.

Deeper Well is Musgraves’ back-to-basics record after 2021’s conflicted star-crossed. Written after her divorce from fellow country singer Ruston Kelly, the lyrics were fragile and vulnerable but came in sleek pop packaging with Lemonade-sized ambitions. It didn’t connect in the same way as her 2018 psychedelic opus Golden Hour. You might imagine her next step to be another corrective, whether commercial or creative, but Deeper Well beats a further retreat. “I don’t care for money or fame,” Musgraves sings on an album that exudes disregard in its rainy-day strums and glazed vocal refrains. There are teases of more compelling directions not taken: Those lyrics are from highlight “Heaven Is,” which, like “Jade Green,” has the mournful formality of traditional British folk in its spindles. The influence of Nick Drake and Linda Thompson collides with Musgraves’ Texan roots on the yearning opener “Cardinal,” which unavoidably evokes “California Dreamin’”—but also the impeccable The Trials of Van Occupanther by her fellow Lone Star druids Midlake. It makes the idea of Musgraves striking out on a folk-rock quest over the existential plains sound extremely appealing.(source is pitchfork.com)