My first impression of this album is that Courtney Barnett is someone I’d like to be friends with. If she is anything like her music, I imagine someone who is friendly, unassuming, and relatable, with a quirkiness and edge that sets her apart from the rest. Barnett is a guitarist and singer-songwriter hailing from Melbourne, Australia whose music is simple, humorous and nonchalant- as Pitchfork paraphrased John Cage, “Barnett has nothing to prove and she’s proving it.”
Her influences are primarily 1990’s grunge rock with some 1960s psychadelia thrown in, but her overall style is difficult to categorize because it is so singular. She isn’t trying for the ‘hit record of the summer,’ nor is she copying other artists or resorting to cheap hooks to draw in listeners, which is what makes this record so instantly likable. It’s produced just enough to sound well mixed and professional, but no more, such that the music is good all by itself, with no frills or auto-tuning.
Courtney Barnett’s debut album, with the quirky title Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, follows two EPs called The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas. The narrow-minded reader might dismiss her here—music with titles this odd is probably equally strange. It’s true that Barnett’s sound is unique, but in the best possible sense. Her work is fresh, self-confident and honest. Listening to the album, one gets the sense that she might be singing her twitter feed aloud. Lyrically, it’s stream-of-consciousness snapshots of her life, but manages to be consistently fluid and pleasingly clever.
Barnett chooses simple subject matter and all her words with clever exactitude, breaking from topical, expected songs about love, heartbreak, etc. that new artists so often resort to. As such, her sound is easy and not at all forced. Highlights include: watching a guy decide to play hooky en route to work, a swimmer faint in a bid to impress the person in the next lane, and contemplating a washed-up seal corpse in the context of man’s slow destruction of the environment.
One of the most striking features of the record is its cohesiveness as it rolls in and out of a wide range of influences and inventiveness. Barnett slips from gorgeous crooning into almost speaking her lyrics over background music, and her guitar playing similarly spans everything from bare acoustic strains to heavy distortion. The backbone of “Small Poppies” draws on psychedelic rock references with a laid-back, lazy guitar. The emotional gravitas that Barnett conveys here is as powerful as that of classic female rock soloists like Janis Joplin or Patti Smith, grounded in a half-lidded haze that sets a completely chilled-out, cool mood.
Barnett transitions to something quite different, but no less her, with “Depreston.” Here, she tells a compelling narrative, almost like a diary entry or an indie documentary, that follows a house-hunting couple through California suburbs. The song is as familiar as a close friend, as Barnett sings, “You said we should look out further/ I guess it wouldn’t hurt us/ we don’t have to be around all these coffee-shops/Now we got that percolator, never made a latte greater/ I’m saving 23 dollars a week.”
The track is pensive and deep without becoming preachy; she isn’t telling us her feelings, just what happened to her in a day. It’s hard to realize just how refreshing that kind of straightforwardness is until you’re listening to it, but imagine something like asking someone how their day was and them telling you what they did and their impression of the world, versus someone who whines over how depressed it made them. The effect is refreshing, and also makes one realize how much of the latter pervades music these days.
“Kim’s Caravan” is the emotional climax of the album, sounding like the background music you’d want if you were thinking about exactly the subject matter she addresses—mortality, environmental responsibility and human culpability for earth’s degeneration. As ever, she isn’t preaching, just quietly considering, over guitar that fades in and out with strung-out power chords played with unapologetic ease.
“Don’t stop listening/I’m not finished yet/ I’m not fishing for your compliments,” Barnett sings on “Debbie Downer,” and it seems like she’s speaking directly to her listeners. Indeed, this record is the start of a promising career, though Barnett doesn’t seem to care whether other people think so. She’s just going to keep cataloging her life and expressing it by making great music, and however it is received, what she produces will be completely hers.
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