Music reviews: Kacey Musgraves, Tori Amos, and Gabrielle Cavassa

‘Middle of Nowhere’ by Kacey Musgraves

★★★

“To describe Middle of Nowhere with a rustic cliché, Kacey Musgraves is going back to her roots,” said Molly Mary O’Brien in Pitchfork. After years of exploring a pop-country blend, the 37-year-old Texas native has assembled a set of new songs that come across like a survey of the past 50 years of country music. Where 2024’s Deeper Well found the singer-songwriter practicing meditation and consulting star charts, Nowhere gives us “Dry Spell,” a “sultry, funny, and pristinely constructed song about not having had sex in 335 days.” While “Loneliest Girl” and the title track show her getting more comfortable with being on her own, she has packed much of the album with guests, including Miranda Lambert on “Horses and Divorces,” and Willie Nelson on “Uncertain, TX.” Fittingly, Middle of Nowhere has an in-between feeling, like a meal at a nouveau farm-to-table restaurant, said Grant Sharples in Paste. “There’s something for everyone, and the food’s pretty good, but nothing really reinvents the wheel.” While it’s as polished as Golden Hour, Musgraves’ 2018 Album of the Year winner, it “lacks the ingenuity.”

 ‘In Times of Dragons’ by Tori Amos

★★★

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On her 18th album, Tori Amos “sounds like she’s rediscovered her fire and purpose,” said Neil Z. Yeung in AllMusic. Yet another “piano-driven epic,” this “devastating” concept album finds the 62-year-old assuming the role of an alter ego on a journey after breaking free of her marriage to a Lizard Demon billionaire. The record opens with “ominous” piano and “pounding martial drums” as Amos, her voice roughened by age, sings about breaking free with the Demon’s goons on her trail. “An instant classic,” that song raises the curtain on more than an hour of “some of the most powerful, wounded, and moving music of her career.” Throughout, “Amos grapples with her legacy through the relationship her heroine has with her long-lost daughter,” a role sung by Amos’ daughter, Natashya Hawley, said Maura Johnston in Rolling Stone. At the outset, Amos’ alter ego is worried that her experiences might make a monster of her, but by the end “she’s learned to live with her scars, using them as a power source.” That proves “an apt metaphor for Amos’ career and the ways she’s blended the confessional and the mystical to often stunning effect.”

‘Diavola’ by Gabrielle Cavassa

★★★

Balancing tenderness and quiet intensity, Gabrielle Cavassa’s voice “has an unforced spellbinding quality that draws the listener in,” said Jim Hynes in Glide. On her first album for Blue Note, the 31-year-old jazz singer “inhabits each lyric of the song as if it belongs to her.” That’s true even when the lyrics are incredibly familiar, as on the California native’s “slightly swinging” rendition of Billy Eckstine’s “Prisoner of Love” or on “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” which she transforms with a “relaxed, slower-than-molasses tempo” that allows her to wring the essence out of every syllable. Compared with B.J. Thomas’ 1969 hit, Cavassa’s version is sweeter “but more contemplative,” said Will Coviello in NOLA.com. That track also features a gorgeous sax solo by Joshua Redman, who co-produced the album. Redman met Cavassa after his manager saw the award-winning singer perform at a New Orleans wedding. The album’s title track, co-written by Cavassa, is also its centerpiece. In Italian, a diavola is a dangerous, powerful woman, and likely a temptress. Cavassa inhabits the character’s vanity and flaws, turning the song into “a showpiece for her singing.”