Celeb News: Kacey Musgraves' Same Trailer Different Park 89 @ MC

Gossip_Boy

89 out of 100 Metascore
Universal acclaim based on 10 Critics

Country Weekly : 100

Quote:

In a country music world of oversingers, Kacey Musgraves is a breath of fresh air. Pure and natural, at times ethereal, Kacey has opted to not compete with power singers like Carrie Underwood and Martina McBride and just let her honest, effortless vocals shine. And while the intention is likely to let the focus fall on the song instead of the singer, what actually happens is that Kacey becomes one of the most distinctive vocalists on country radio today.

And much like her voice, this 12-song collection is distinctive in both its arrangements and lyrics. Musically, the songs range from the jangly Americana groove of the opening track, “Silver Linings,” to the acrid, thumping “Stupid.”

It is at its lyrical foundation that the album shines most brightly, however. Kacey and co-writers Josh Osborne, Shane McAnally, Brandy Clark and Luke Laird produce track after track of musical poetry reminiscent of Townes Van Zandt.

Whether it’s the heartbreaking hit single “Merry Go ’Round,” the inspiring “Follow Your Arrow” or the toe-tapping “My House,” each track evokes an emotion, a giggle, a tear or a memory, but always a hunger for what’s next.

Entertainment Weekly : 91

Quote:

Female country stars are such a rarity these days that some people may be inclined to compare Kacey Musgraves, one of the most dynamic new voices to come along in years, to her few contemporaries, like Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert. The truth is, the 24-year-old doesn't need their reflected shine; she's already penned songs for ABC's Nashville and co-written Lambert's current single, ''Mama's Broken Heart'' — and she garnered her own top 10 hit with ''Merry Go 'Round,'' a gothic lament-slash-ode to small-town America.

On her confident, melodic major-label debut, Musgraves' vocals are pleasingly agile, but what Same Trailer Different Park continually showcases is her writing prowess. ''Keep climbing that mountain of dirty tricks/And when you finally get to the top/Step off,'' she advises a vindictive stone-thrower on the playfully plucky ''Step Off.'' And on the wry ''Follow Your Arrow,'' a twangy YOLO anthem already ruffling feathers in the tradition-minded country community, she sings slyly, ''Make lots of noise/Kiss lots of boys/Or kiss lots of girls if that's something you're into.'' Musgraves has a way of injecting humor into even her most melancholic musings. But make no mistake, this girl is no joke. A-

American Songwriter : 90

Quote:

It takes only a glance at the title of Kacey Musgraves’ Same Trailer, Different Park to get a sense of the depressed misfortune and relentless boredom that commands and often dictates the 24 year-old Texas singer’s debut album. That sense of being trapped, of feeling stuck with a relationship, home, or job that refuse to live up to their promise, is best conveyed in “Merry Go Round,” Musgraves’ debut single released last fall that served as a warning call, a way for Nashville to tell the rest of the country about its brightest new star.

Musgraves’ middle-American melancholy avoids big-picture moralizing and small-town stereotyping . Instead of leaning on empty rural signifiers, Same Trailer relies on its stories of defiance and defeat faced by the men and women struggling with their surroundings in the album’s dozen songs. Same Trailer’s stories are full of upswings and nosedives; there are sporadic highs and dramatic lows. The song’s singers are well-wishers and help-seekers,deadbeats trying to be better and do-gooders that are falling behind. Musgraves likes to focus in on her characters at these small, pivotal moments, when they come to terms with their own faults and dreams, when they’re on the verge of a breakthrough or a meltdown.

On Same Trailer, there’s a brave nobility in ****ing up. Her heroes are pot-smoking, bad-decision making outcasts whose only ways out of their own depressed lives are through big mistakes and blind commitments to instinct. They dodge church, chase emotionless sex, crave old love they should have long forgotten. For Musgraves, to strive to be better is to mess up trying.

The takeaway point of “Follow Your Arrow,” the album’s centerpiece that preaches a faithful march to the beat of one’s own drum, would perhaps feel like a cliche in different hands, but Musgraves, who wraps her songs in self-conscious humor and sharp wordplay, delivers the album’s penultimate song as a solution to the rest of its problems. “Every arrow that I am is true,” she sings on “I Miss You,” another way of saying that plenty of her arrows are missing. Musgraves places great beauty and hope in those arrows that miss their targets, in the missteps and risks that lead the characters of Same Trailer, Different Park down dead-ends and dark corners. “If you’re ever gonna find a silver lining,” she advises in the album’s opening track, a preview of lessons to come, “it’s gotta be a cloudy day.”

Musgraves, who sings with a detached indifference, as if to say there’s nothing especially unique about her stories of small-towned despair, has learned a thing or two from her characters. Her major label debut, which moves from country waltz to roadhouse blues, from rootsy singer-songwriter narratives to irresistible country pop, follows its own relentless arrow throughout, and the result is one of the most fully-formed, arresting debuts Nashville’s seen in years.

Rolling Stone: 80

Quote:

"Merry Go 'Round," the spectacular gut-punch single from 24-year-old Texan country singer Kacey Musgraves, dropped out of the clear blue sky in September. Same Trailer Different Park proves Musgraves is for real. Although she sings just fine, she doesn't have a powerful voice; like all Nashville bands, hers can play, but the music is careful, meticulous, midtempo. But man, can Musgraves write. The album showcases a songwriting voice you won't hear anywhere else in pop: young, female, downwardly mobile, fiercely witty. The loping "Follow Your Arrow" advocates nonconformity, pot-smoking (if you feel like it) and homosexuality (if you're so inclined). "Blowin' Smoke" is a blues-tinged short story about nicotine addiction and waiting tables in Vegas; "It Is What It Is" is the best, saddest ode to friends-with-benefits* sex you'll ever hear. Musgraves' tunes are as supplely catchy as Taylor Swift's; the lyrics bite as hard as Elvis Costello's. More, please.

All Music Guide: 80

Quote:

Kacey Musgraves could easily be contemporary country's next big thing. She's a sharp, detailed songwriter with a little bit of an edge, and while it's tempting to think of her as another coming of Taylor Swift, say, she's got a bit of an edge, and the kind of sureness about what she's doing as a songwriter and performer that puts her closer to a Miranda Lambert. On her first nationally distributed album, Same Trailer Different Park, she definitely sounds more on the Lambert side of things, with a sparse, airy sound that lets her lyrics shine, and she'd as soon use a banjo in her arrangements as a snarling Stratocaster. From her debut single, the marvelous "Merry Go 'Round" (which is included here as the third track), Musgraves showed an intelligent, careful writing style that is as pointed as it is poignant, and even though the song seems to skewer small-town country life, it does it without malice or agenda, and is really more just telling it true than anything else, a trait that ought to be treasured in Nashville but usually isn't. Nashville wants one to tell it true as long as that telling conforms to the template, which Musgraves isn't likely to do. "Merry Go 'Round" might be the best song here, but there are others that are nearly as good, like the lilting, wise opener, "Silver Lining," the implausible "Dandelion" (one wonders how she manages to make such a winning song out of such a metaphor, but she does), and the gutsy (and again, wise) "Follow Your Arrow," all of which feature clear-eyed observations, unintrusive but appropriate arrangements, and a certain flair for telling it like it is and making it sound like bedrock, obvious wisdom. Musgraves has a sense of humor, too, and all of these traits add up to make Same Trailer Different Park more than a collection of songs just aiming for the country charts.

http://www.metacritic.com/music/same...acey-musgraves

Mezik

Hunter_13

****ing queen! She deserves this!

I've had the album on repeat since buying it this morning!

boyswifty

Gossip_Boy

The New York Times: 80

Michael 87

This girls has a great voice and she is so ****ing sexy...

NotTonightTho

SLAY THEM KACEY

QueenBLadyG

Such a great album!

BlueMoon77

WOW!!! I'm slayed with this album!!!!!!!! I hope she wins all her awards at the upcoming ACMS!!!! Such great music

Gossip_Boy

Expert Witness (MSN Music) : 91

Quote:

Far be it from me to tear down the finest lyricist to rise up out of conscious country since Miranda Lambert, if not Bobby Pinson himself. But "Merry Go 'Round"‑-which I liked, year-ended, whole thing‑-was epochal only by the standards of country radio, which is to say of pusillanimity itself. Already I've gotten to where I can't take the homilies of the lead "Silver Lining," where I see that her label bio proudly quotes the same quatrain that made me go yuck‑-"If you wanna find the honey/You can't be scared of the bees [OK so far]/If you want to see the forest/You're gonna have to look past the trees [oy]." "Dandelion"? "I Miss You"? Does "pat" mean anything to you? "Precious"? "Pert"? I like the trailer song and love the smoking in Vegas song and am impressed by how strong she closes, four quite distinct tracks climaxing with one in which her homilies risk a tolerance her target market could find intolerable that's topped by "It Is What It Is," in which she screws a guy because no better option is currently presenting itself. But someone up there is telling her she'd better play it safe, and it could be her. A MINUS

Mean Trees

She off the bat has become the most acclaimed country artist of the year (and most probably one of the most acclaimed ever!)

Mezik

She's coming to sweep the Grammys next year.

atishvaze

A pretty solid album
Totally deserved

Gossip_Boy

Quote:

Originally posted by Mean Trees

She off the bat has become the most acclaimed country artist of the year (and most probably one of the most acclaimed ever!)

And she totally deserves it. Her album is fantastic.

castle13

Round 1 of Same Trailer Different Park Album Survivor is up!

Please play guys!

http://atrl.net/forums/showthread.ph...9#post14393759

Thanks! :hugs:

Gossip_Boy

Paste Magazine: 83

Quote:

Kacey Musgraves, 23, sings unvarnished truths about being hooked on “Mary Kay, Mary Jane and Mary down the block,” but she’s maintained the sunniness that is the right of the young. Even surveying the stationary “Merry Go Round,” she shines.

It’s a real world the pragmatic singer/songwriter lives in. “It Is What It Is” is a “making do with what you know ’til you find something better” love song for a post-modern kid-of-divorce kinda reality.

But that’s not all that sets country’s latest blaze of glory apart. With three self-released projects, a duet with the Josh Abbott Band and surviving TV’s dreadful Nashville Star, Musgrave is not a hothouse Country Barbie. A gritty girl dug in, she embraces her Bob Dylan overtones (the harmonica on “My House”), Roy Orbison steel cry and mariachi Eagles-tinge (“I Miss You”) and a tumble of revival slap ’n’ stomp (“Stupid”). This is no conventional pop-country supernova.

With a voice that’s pretty, but brazen, Musgraves has no problem slinging attitude, crying ******** or coyly advocating same-sex amour/dope-smoking while skewering hypocrisy. With a lilt in her phrasing, “Follow Your Arrow” demonstrates the beauty of living your life as it feels right, with the tambourine finding the beat and the acoustic strumming merrily away.

At a time when Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers are dominating pop, there would be bridge country artist—and that artist isn’t steam-punk devotee Taylor Swift, whose treacly cat-offs are so strident. Instead, the banjo stroll of “Step Off” takes “Mean” and spins it with more inventive rhymes. All candy-coated truculence, Musgraves lullingly intones, “Screwed everybody over in this town/Ain’t nothing between you and the cold hard ground/Keep running your mouth and stretching the truth/you might find a hole in your parachute…”

Like Swift, Musgraves sings of shattered romance, stacking images and sensations like toothpick castles. Still, “Keep It to Yourself” is more survival of a tender heart than stridence on the half shell.

That charm and pluck breaks ground for girls who want to be more than clichés. The low slung Stones-ish vamping yowl of “Blowin’ Smoke,” all hip-swagger ’n’ bravado, takes the downstroke hard and witnesses to the realm of the waitress on the run and the smack talked by the ones left behind. Alley cat slide, a saucy chorus of validators and a bit of barbed electric guitar stitch down the details of shiftwork and bravado. It’s a manifesto that’ll never come true, but is dignity enough to get by on? A thin margin, but one Musgraves walks straight into the sunset.

Gossip_Boy

The Guardian: 80

Quote:

Twenty-four-year-old Texan Kacey Musgraves has been hailed as part of a new wave of forthright female country singers; not since the emergence of Taylor Swift has there been as much buzz in the genre about a young artist's crossover potential. Like Swift, Musgraves is a gifted songwriter – though her route to the mainstream is likely to come via audiences other than teenpop. She sings with an affectless detachment reminiscent of, say, Aimee Mann, and uses it to cut sharply through the lies people tell themselves: "We get bored, so we get married/ Just like dust, we settle in this town," she sighs on Merry Go 'Round. Her cynicism is always leavened by empathy, though: Keep It to Yourself puts a lovelorn ex firmly but gently in his place, while the ennui-riven Blowin' Smoke is a pitch-perfect, non-judgmental depiction of trash-talking, small-town waitresses reminiscing about one of their own who got away. Notable, too, is Musgraves' casual endorsement of gay relationships on the jaunty shrug of Follow Your Arrow.

Gossip_Boy

PopMatters : 80

Quote:

I’ve always loved Lurleen Lumpkin’s country music, so I was happily surprised to hear her voice come out of my speakers with a whole new batch of mobile home songs. What, you say that’s not Lurleen; that it’s some gal named Kacey whose main claim to fame was coming in number seven on television’s Nashville Star? Oh well, same trailer, different park. Actually, it literally is the album entitled Same Trailer Different Park. You can take the woman out of the camper but you can’t make her leave her low-rent roots.

And you wouldn’t want to. Musgraves takes the mundane details of small town existence to show that the superficially pleasant place is filled with hypocrisy and broken dreams. She’s keen enough to know that life doesn’t always turn out like you want it to, pride can be an excuse for ignorance, and sometimes the people you love are the same ones that hold you back. Her response is to follow her own path, or as she puts it, “Follow Your Arrow”.

Musgrave co-wrote all of the 12 songs on her first major label release. The opening lines to “Follow Your Arrow” reveal Musgraves’ insightful sense of humor about living the rural life and the costs:

If you save yourself for marriage
You’re a bore
If you don’t save yourself for marriage
You’re a hor-
-rible person

Musgraves accents the first syllable of “horrible” to show she means “*****” and is not going to mince words. Her list of “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” items goes on to include everything from church attendance to drinking to being fat. But she doesn’t leave it like that—she tells her female listeners to kiss lots of boys, or if they are lesbians, to kiss lots of girls, and if life gets too “straight” to go ahead and smoke a joint.

Lurleen may have wanted to “bunk” with the married Homer, but she never took things this far. It’s unfair to compare Musgraves with the comic character because as charming as Lurleen was at incorporating mobile home stereotypes into the tropes of her songs (written by the actress who voiced her, Beverly D’Angelo, who also played Patsy Cline in Coal Miner’s Daughter), she never took the pathos to suggest anything more than funniness. Musgraves uses humor to suggest the darker side of simple living.

This can be seen in the album’s big hit single, “Merry Go Round”, in which Musgraves sings, “Mama’s hooked on Mary Kay. / Brother’s hooked on Mary Jane. / Daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down.” Yes, the alliterative comparison is witty, but it is more than that. Life is boring, so people do what they have to do in order to distract themselves from the meaningless of it all or they end up like John Berryman and kill themselves. Musgraves isn’t willing to give it all up yet and urges us to think about our limited time on Earth.

In other words, Musgrave is no “Redneck Woman” who celebrates ignorance and bad taste in the guise of country living. Instead Musgraves just sees things, without judging. On the evocative “Blowin’ Smoke”, she describes the waitresses at a small town café who smoke cigarettes and overeat to fill the void in their lives. She doesn’t put them down or romanticize their loneliness. Musgrave just paints a picture of their shared solitude, and she lets us see our absurd selves in the lives of others.

That’s the template Musgrave uses on all of her material. She knows we live at the corner of Is that Right Avenue and Strange Days Boulevard. It’s funny until it ain’t, but it sure makes for some great music.

Hunter_13

Slaying.