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Beyoncé: Cowboy Carter review – from hoedown to full-blown genre throwdown
The musician’s eighth album straddles the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the blues – and Becky with the Good Hair via Dolly Parton’s Jolene
You can say that amounts to laying it on a bit thick, but both Daughter and 16 Carriages are fantastic songs: acoustic guitars playing host to strong melodies and, on the latter, a vocal delivery that carries the distinctive patterns of rap. It’s remedied by the simple expedient of going wildly off-piste: if the lambent soft-rock of Bodyguard gets you wondering whether the “departure into country” tag strictly fits Cowboy Carter, the sudden appearance of a straightforward hip-hop track, Spaghetti, confirms that it isn’t. It’s all incredibly well done and hugely entertaining, but the sense that the album is clinging on to its original concept by its fingernails – throwing in the odd lyric about rhinestones or whisky and the occasional intimation of pedal steel guitar – is hard to avoid.
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