POP/ROCK
Kacey Musgraves, "Deeper Well" (Interscope/MCA Nashville)
Contentment makes for tricky songwriting territory. Songs thrive more often on extremes: desire, heartache, rage, despair, striving, longing, ecstasy. But Musgraves has now made two superb albums suffused with satisfaction: "Golden Hour" from 2018, which won the Grammy for album of the year, and her new "Deeper Well."
On "Golden Hour," Musgraves sang about the gratification and relief of blissful romance in songs like "Butterflies." With "Deeper Well" — which follows her divorce album, "Star-Crossed" — Musgraves finds more comfort in a wistful self-sufficiency. She savors small pleasures, personal connections and casual revelations, with a touch of new-age mysticism.
In the album's title song, Musgraves calmly notes how she's setting aside youthful misjudgments. She's moving away from people with "dark energy" and no longer getting high every morning. At 35, she's glad to be more mature. "It's natural when things lose their shine," she sings, "so other things can glow."
On "Star-Crossed," the music pushed well beyond country, incorporating surreal electronics and sultry R&B. "Deeper Well" is leaner and less determinedly eclectic. Gratitude is at the core of the new songs. Musgraves may be contented, but she's not complacent. She finds omens in nature in "Cardinal," which harks back to the modal folk-rock of the Byrds.
In "Dinner With Friends," she lists small things that please her — "the way that the sun on my floor makes a pattern of light" — and plants a political barb, appreciating, "My home state of Texas/The sky there, the horses and dogs," before adding, "But none of their laws."
JON PARELES, New York Times
Justin Timberlake, "Everything I Thought It Was" (RCA)
It would've been weird enough for Timberlake to open his new album with a sob story about the high price of fame. But one in which he frames the pain he's endured as a byproduct of his devotion to his Tennessee hometown? That's truly unhinged. Yet it's just what Timberlake does with "Memphis," the first song on his new album, more than half a decade after the release of his previous LP.
Over a bleary, slow-mo trap beat, the singer and former boy-band star, now 43, laments the isolation he experienced and the sacrifices he made on his way up — a wild choice given the critique that's coalesced in recent years of Timberlake as a man long permitted to glide by troubles that damaged the women around him (including his ex-girlfriend Britney Spears and his onetime Super Bowl halftime partner Janet Jackson).
It's also a baffling aesthetic approach: By rooting his struggles in his connection to an African American cultural capital — "I was way too far out in the world, but I still put on for my city," he insists in his well-practiced blaccent — Timberlake is flaunting his proximity to Blackness at a moment when pop seems to have little of the use it once did for white guys doing R&B. Consider the disappearance of Robin Thicke; consider Justin Bieber's apparent reluctance to jump back into the game.
None of this is to doubt Timberlake's genuine love of R&B nor to diminish his undeniable skill for making it: Though it's larded with glib disco-funk tracks and morose, One Republic-style pop-rock tunes, "Everything I Thought It Was" contains a handful of gems in "Love & War," a Prince-ish ballad with his prettiest falsetto singing, and the spacey slow jam "What Lovers Do"; "Selfish," the album's coolly received lead single, is another highlight, this one with echoes of Bieber's underrated "Changes" from 2020.
MIKAEL WOOD, Los Angeles Times
New releases
• Kenny Chesney, "Born"
• Shakira, "Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran"
• Future X Metro Boomin, "We Don't Trust You"
• Gary Clark Jr., "JPEG Raw"
• Adrianne Lenker, "Bright Future"
• Waxahatchee, "Tigers Blood"
• Gossip, "Real Power"
• Maynard James Keenan, "Cinquanta"
