No, we’re not gonna get what we need… but does Kacey have what we want?
[Video]
[5.67]
[6]
Alfred Soto: Kacey Musgraves, a specialist in the offering of a facile lovelorn prettiness, does not offend as girlfriend and ex. “Goin’ down smooth as Mexico honey,” she sings with with neither smoothness nor sweetness, a victim of her cowriters’ reluctance to disassemble a conceit or to at least fucking follow through on it.
[3]
Nortey Dowuona: Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk took great pains to build a smooth, filed-down structure, with Todd Lombardo slipping into the mix to color and brighten the mix with his guitar styling and cowriter Steph Jones lingering below, crooning warm counter-melodies. But Kacey has become too plain and wan of a singer to give this patiently assembled songcraft the power it needs to stick in your craw. It also feels redundant when Pedro Tovar Jr. was also available to arrnage this into a true Mexican tribute.
[5]
Oliver Maier: Makes me sad to listen to this and think about how expressive Kacey’s voice can be. Next to almost any song from Golden Hour she sounds anesthetised as she punctuates the chorus with listless “What the hell”s and “Yeahhhhs”. The instrumental, drenched in reverb and several BPMs too slow, does her no favours. Incredibly depressing music.
[3]
Al Varela: Curious that this is the song that becomes Kacey Musgraves’s biggest crossover hit to date, over even songs off of Golden Hour. A smoky hookup jam where Kacey flirts with a stranger from Mexico where the sexual tension is so gripping that even if it’s not forever, she’s gonna cherish every moment they have together. I really love the way Mexican instruments are implemented into the song. The click of the castanets along with the drifting Spanish guitar and accordion to anchor the melody harmonize beautifully into this sultry, silky soundscape where the mere glance at a handsome stranger could signal the start of an unforgettable night. It helps that Kacey herself delivers such a wonderful performance. There’s a calmness in her voice that makes her otherwise crass confidence come off as seductive and intriguing. To the point where the video merely amplifies that tension rather than adding to it. It fits so well as a late summer hit, one that will likely go over well in Mexico as much as it is in the States.
[9]
Julian Axelrod: Kacey followed up “Dry Spell” with her sexiest song to date — and people say she lost her sense of humor!
[7]
Claire Davidson: I’m not surprised that “Mexico Honey” was the Middle of Nowhere deep cut to gain traction upon the album’s release: if “Dry Spell” was a coy nod to Kacey Musgraves’s dormant sexual frustration, this track inverts that concept, allowing all that pent-up energy to flow freely in a ballad whose selling point is languid sensuality. At least, that’s the song’s pitch — Kacey Musgraves is rarely this forward in discussing her sexuality on record, and that apprehension is definitely legible in the track. The verses are written in a pseudo-rap cadence intended to convey flustered heat, but Musgraves, whose vocal presence has always been characterized by colloquial warmth, never develops the precise intonation needed to elevate this approach beyond gimmickry. That lays a shaky foundation for the more fluid chorus, which itself seems reluctant to capture its central hook-up with embodied detail: its first stanza ends with a bewildered remark of “what the hell?”, as if Musgraves feels obligated to de-escalate the situation with a joke before things get too intimate. It’s not like “Mexico Honey” features particularly steamy instrumentation, either. While the loping guitar strums behind the song’s melody do lend it some suggestive magnetism, the only thing that really differentiates the hook from the verses are the perfunctory layers of reverb applied to Musgraves’s voice, a touch that feels even more slapdash for how rapidly these segments shift between tones. That lack of deliberation only makes the bridge, which Musgraves delivers in a falsetto reminiscent of Lana Del Rey, seem all the more jarring — one wishes the song’s production team embraced the slow-burn approach Musgraves claims to prefer.
[6]
Katherine St. Asaph: Daft Punk????? Not since Katy Perry making out to Radiohead has an artist namedrop been so incongruous. Even Musgraves’ delivery sounds clipped and blank, as if the producer had to splice in some prompt output because no available human could credibly sing words that associate Daft Punk with this shrinking, mouse-coded thing. “Shaking my ass in my hot pink shorts” and “laying down laughing on the bathroom floor” don’t fit, either, but at least their not-fitting doesn’t come with a sound. (No one’s even done a mashup! That’s how poor the fit is!)
[4]
Ian Mathers: I’ve long been a Musgraves… let’s say “non-convert” rather than “skeptic” (I don’t doubt the plaudits she’s gotten from others, she just never landed for me). Fittingly enough, the first time she gets me she also fixes what I thought was the problem was with “High Horse.” Here, the low-key, simmering approach is indeed the kind of slow-burn success I wanted; in fact, my favourite part of “Mexico Honey” might be when she downshifts back out of the more dramatic middle eight into the chorus again with a kind of sensual implacability. Whether or not you’ve had the kind of reverie “Mexico Honey” evokes (and I do hope everyone who wants to does), the song is heady enough on its own to be intoxicating.
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