'Johnny's in the basement,
Mixing up the medicine.
I'm on the pavement,
Thinking 'bout the government.'
Bob Dylan
'They paved paradise. Put up a parking lot.'
Joni Mitchell
'Frankly Mr. Shankly, I'm a sickening wreck.
I've got the Twenty First Century breathing down my neck.'
Morrissey, The Smiths
'Jen insists that we buy organic vegetables and I must admit that I was a little skeptical at first. A little pesticide can't hurt.'
Courtney Barnett
The Courtney Barnett backlash has begun. At least in my life. A man named Stagger Lee who I reference on a fairly regular basis on here because he consistently directs me towards great music dissed her this morning on his Facebook page. Another poster then commented that she'd rather cut her ears off with a rusty spoon than get a free download. My response was that I liked her because she made me happy. The thread has been growing all day and I can no longer make head or tail of it. Such are the joys of music critical cut and thrust on Social Media nowadays. Still it provoked me into finally getting round to this after a couple of days on holiday of prevaricating and sitting in pubs drinking beer, reading. I'll now proceed to make amends and get round to reviewing her new record.
Barnett and her band are reaching some sort of indie critical mass in terms of the attention they're getting. She has 77,000 Facebook likes which is not bad going for someone who makes the kind of music she does and more than likely had ten times less just a year back. But then Kanye West has 9 and a half million which I suppose puts it all into some kind of perspective. She won't be headlining Glastonbury any time just yet. But Pitchfork and The Guardian seem to be scrambling over each other to praise her to the high heavens, she's becoming a regular on 6 for Music the UK radio station of choice for middle aged UK hipsters, and she's on her way here now, (to the UK where I am), for a pretty much sold out set of venues one of which is at Newcastle University where I'll be next week.
I saw her live first round about a year ago in a much smaller venue when she was still a word of mouth concern. I'd been put on the case by my sister and brother-in-law with whom I fairly much share tastes and interests. They directed me towards Avant Gardener which is pretty much the prototype Barnett track. If you don't go for that and its Wes Anderson inspired promo then you're unlikely to fall for anything else she has to offer.
Since then her star has continued to rise. In my universe and others. She seems to have made some inroads in American college and indie circles. I've heard her record playing in local stores and customers approaching the counter to ask who it was and purchase their own copies. The kind of wish-fulfillment scenario you see in Hollywood films starring the likes of Tom Hanks about music sensations or John Cusack about Record Store life. Her compilation of early EPs Sea of Split Peas must have shifted a few copies in the interim, to the likes of me who spend far too much time skulking in these places as we mark the hours since our return to vinyl like prodigal sons who can't bring themselves to leave the parental home again now they're back again after years away.
But now the much anticipated first album proper is upon us and the standard British backlash is surely due too. The Guardian wheeled out veteran music journalist and close affiliate of Kurt and Courtney, (Love that is), Everett True to pass judgement on it last Friday and he raised a lot of the doubts discerning listeners might have had about it in a thoughtful review before giving it a clean bill of health and five stars.
In many respects the album is a tough prospect for Barnett, having received pretty much relentless critical praise up to this point. With Avant Gardener and History Eraser her early singles and most immediately commercial songs she'd laid out her template and everything else from this point on is likely to have diminishing returns at least in terms of credibility among the Indie community as her bank balance improves. But as she gets richer, will she get better? Avant Gardener particularly seems like a song within a particular vein that it's difficult to improve on if you like that kind of thing and I do. Literary, wordy, humorous but thoughtful, self conscious and self effacing, melodic country, garage and grunge inflected rocky pop songs for Velvet Underground, Go Betweens, Nirvana and Lemonheads fans. Sung in an Australian accent which is actually key in grounding it in a clear, unborrowed sense of place, personality and identity that very little Pop Music has these days. This all however, is still not the whole story or everything that's riding on this new record.
There are two Courtney Barnetts When I saw Barnett last Spring, she and her group came on like a Garage band, half Nuggets, half CBGBs, half Seattle Grunge (yes I know that's three halves), jettisoning the more thoughtful, contemplative moments of her early EPs until the second encore which she did alone, when she played something quieter, (Depreston from the new record I suspect), before heading offstage. Understandable perhaps with a band behind you but not doing full justice to the talent that wrote Out of the Woodwork and Porcelain. which owe little or nothing to the artists I've mentioned in the preceding paragraph and are more truly I suspect heartfelt personal statements than the 'up' stuff.
Still, she's young and Sometimes, thankfully strikes a good balance between the two styles. While there's nothing on here as good as Avant Gardener, which bridges the space between her two styles better than anything else she's done up to this point. I didn't really expect there to be a song that quite matched it, just as nothing quite ever matches a first kiss and anyway there is more than enough on this new record that attests to her talent. It'll be a record I play for years to come which is testament enough after only a week living with it. As True pointed out in his review it's a grower and it seems more than sufficiently assured to ensure her star continues to climb for a fair while yet.
There are exercises in songwriting, like opener Elevator Operator, a third-person narrative about a young man who appears to be about to throw himself off the top of a high building but then doesn't. This lyric is sufficient in itself to explain why Barnett has garnered so much attention in such a short
time.
'Oliver Paul, twenty years old
Thick head of hair, worries he's going bald
Wakes up at quarter past nine
Fair evades his way down the 96 tram line
Breakfast on the run again, he's well aware
He's dropping soy linseed Vegemite crumbs everywhere
Feeling sick at the sight of his computer
He dodges his way through the Swanston commuters
Rips off his tie, hands it to a homeless man
Sleeping in the corner of a metro bus stand and he screams
"I'm not going to work today
Going to count the minutes that the trains run late
Sit on the grass building pyramids out of Coke cans"
Headphone wielding to the Nicholas building
He trips on a pothole that's not been filled in
He waits for an elevator, one to nine
A lady walks in and waits by his side
Her heels are high and her bag is snakeskin
Hair pulled so tight you can see her skeleton
Vickers perfume on her breath
A tortoise shell necklace between her breasts
She looks him up and down with a botox frown
He's well used to that look by now
The elevator dings and they awkwardly step in
Their fingers touch on the rooftop button
Don't jump little boy, don't jump off that roof
You've got your whole life ahead of you, you're still in your youth
I'd give anything to have skin like you
He said "I think you're projecting the way that you're feeling
I'm not suicidal, just idling insignificantly
I come up here for perception and clarity
I like to imagine I'm playing SimCity
All the people look like ants from up here
And the wind's the only traffic you can hear"
He said "All I ever wanted to be
Was an elevator operator, can you help me please?"
Don't jump little boy, don't jump off that roof
You've got your whole life ahead of you, you're still in your youth
I'd give anything to have skin like you
Don't jump little boy, don't jump off that roof
You've got your whole life ahead of you, you're still in your youth
I'd give anything to have skin like you.'
As I said, it strikes me as an exercise, rather than a song focused on the human condition and what makes us what we are, but it's very nicely achieved and I'd imagine Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, particular heroes of mine of course given the naming of this blog and how much of it I've spent writing about them would doff their caps to its not inconsiderable lyrical artistry and melodic nous. No mean feat pulling off an entirely realised short story during the course of a three minute Pop Song and putting out a tune to boot. Most others who've tried in the last forty years have fallen short in one respect or the other.
From here she proceeds to Pedestrian at Best which came out a few weeks back as a taster for the record. It made me uneasy at the time. The lyric, though extremely skilled, sounded slightly forced as did the accompanying video. It seemed a subconscious attempt to shoehorn something particular, small and fully formed for a broader commercial audience. Dilution. It's Nirvana-lite of course, not that I mind that but initially I was disappointed and slightly underwhelmed by both the song and its promo and it made me slightly hesitant about the forthcoming record and whether it would live up to my expectations. Fortunately it's not typical of an overall shift in sound or lyrical direction and as a result it slots in better here and feels more comfortable than might have been expected.
These two tracks indicate I imagine why some not inconsiderable expectation might be building behind Barnett for this record. I visited Canterbury's HMV earlier this week and there it was, in pride of place both in the CD and Vinyl section as the main release of the day. My brother in law who is a graphic designer and has worked on record sleeves and similar marketing devices with Rough Trade among others for many years was asked at short notice to produce a chair resembling the one on its sleeve to accompany her and her band on their trek across country next week. Promotional wheels rolling forward.
From the second track on the album becomes considerably more left-field and idiosyncratic which I suspect will be what fans of Barnett's were hoping for. There's less of a sense of a songwriter stretching herself to see what else she can do and more of the feeling that she's refining and building on the talents that made her worthy of notice in the first place.
For the rest of the first side of the record the pace becomes considerably more laid-back and the lyrics and melodies are allowed to breathe to a greater and more satisfying degree. The musicians also get the opportunity to show what they can do. The band has expanded from a trio to a quartet since I saw them last with the addition of Drones guitarist Dan Luscombe who fills out their sound considerably.
Third song An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in New York), begins the wind down and is a move into the basic sincerity which is one of her greatest basic strengths. A song to listen to when missing someone.
'I lay awake at four. Staring at the wall. Counting all the cracks backwards in my best French. Reminds me of a book, I skim-read in a surgery. All about palmistry. I wonder what's in store for me. I pretend the plaster is the skin on my palms. And the cracks are representative of what is going on. I lose a breath. My loveline seems entwined with death. I'm thinking of you too.'
This is why Barnett is drawing the attention she is. Luscombe's guitar starts buzzing like an irritable wasp and the song winds out. Done and dusted in just over three minutes.
Small Poppies maintains the plaintive mood but is more expansive stretching out to seven minutes though it doesn't feel it, allowing its Hispanic sounding guitars uncoil at leisure without ever once seeming overcooked. It seems concerned with self-loathing, (why not?), and once again bound up in the ideas that invade your thought patterns when you just can't sleep and you're all alone in the early hours.
The album is now grounded on firm emotional foundations and the side closes with Depreston, one of the songs that was put out there months before the album arrived as an indication of where she might be going. Depreston is definitely intended as one of the record's main calling cards. Listening to it on Spotify the other evening while eating dinner at my brother and sister-in-laws, (different ones from the aforementioned, and less acquainted with Barnett's music), it leaped out from the speakers obviously to all of us in terms of melody and mood as having commercial legs.
It's also my younger sister's favourite. But then she's currently engaged in house-hunting and the kind of world weary ennui that overcomes you while doing it, imagining living in empty space that's not yet yours, realising you may be about to move into a 'deceased estate' . So a song about mortality and ageing and the people you choose to spend your life with and the shared memories you create, have created or will create with them in those shared spaces. The passing of time. Very well realised.
So, lots of ticked boxes. However, my abiding problem with it remains. It reminds me, inescapably of Journey's AOR staple, 'Don't Stop the Feeling', a song that has become horribly ubiquitous over recent years since it turned up on Glee .Songs that remind me of Journey aren't likely to end up in my Top 10 list come the end of the year. Still, my problem, and I sincerely hope I haven't made it someone else's.
So at the end of the first side she's holding out well in terms of her promise of putting out well-crafted songs, nuanced with personality, melody and lyrical resonance and a well-judged blend of Courtney loud and Courtney quiet. So where does she go on Side 2? Well pretty much to the same places via a different route.
Tracks One to Four are grounded more immediately in a less introspective place than we've just come from. Aqua Profundis! is about fancying someone in the next lane at the swimming pool and getting your act together to impress them too late because you black out instead. Two minutes, no chorus. You can taste the chlorine.
'Felt my muscles burn. I took a tumble turn. For the worse. It's a curse. My lack of athleticism. Sunk like a stone. Like a first owner's home loan. When I came to. You and your towel were gone.'
Dead Fox comes across as a Mid-Era Beatles album track melodically and is chock a block with modern stream of thought. About ecology, driving, shopping, the basic transient emotions we all experience as time passes.
Nobody Really Cares if You Don't Come to the Party was singled out as the weak track on the record in Everett True's initial review though he admitted he was coming round to it with repeated listens. It's generic, but hey there are songs no stronger or weaker on the Nirvana and Lemonheads albums Barnett draws on as sources of main inspiration. It has a fine Dylanesque title, another sturdy melody, and the following lines to recommend it most.
' You say you'll sleep when you're dead. I'm afraid I'll die in my sleep. I guess that's not a bad way to go.'
Debbie Downer despite its slacker title is musically more grounded in Sixties Garage, complete with fairground, swirling organ. The line that jumps out here is, 'I'm growing older every time I blink my eyes. Boring, neurotic, everything that I despise.' Much as she loves him, Barnett is not cut out to be Cobain. Despite her obvious struggles, she's claimed in interviews to have a mid-life crisis every day, there's a natural buoyancy to her thought patterns.
At least during the faster pop songs. The drawn out slower stuff is more problematic and for me where Barnett touches on greatness and gives a glimpse into the genuinely troubled soul she has, which lets face it she shares with most of us a lot of the time. Because it's here that she really dwells on the issues of the passing of time, mortality, the triviality of most of what we experience and our place in the scheme of things. The unanswerable questions. In the poppier tracks she contradicts herself jokingly quite consciously from one line to the next as if nothing is worth dwelling on and it strikes me partially as an act of self protection. During the introspective songs and there are two more coming up to round off the record, she goes to one place and stays there, Explores the moment, the emotions she's going through and the songs resonate and echo, like ripples in a pond or the stone dropping through water that has caused them.
In this respect the record is like night and day. Kim's Caravan which may be the best thing on the album is about night or at least about the hours that draw in towards it. Barnett is too young really to have such thoughts or at least she shouldn't be able to nail them and put them across quite as well as she does. The song starts with a dead seal on a beach that has already been saved three times this weeks and goes from there to where it must to dwell on our own mortality and sense of it. It's thoughtful and resonant and profound and light and pleasurable at the same time in the way that all good culture is, even Pop Culture, perhaps specifically Pop Culture because on the surface, it more than almost any other Art form appears so disposable.
The song is about a lone walk down a beach, Sunset Strip, Phillip Island not Los Angeles, begins as a narrative then becomes a drift into thought. About the state of the Barrier Reef and of course about what we're all doing here.
'We either think that we're invincible or that we are invisible realistically we're somewhere in between. We all think that we are nobody but everybody is somebody else's somebody.'
This strikes me as pretty damn good whatever you choose to compare it with. The rest of the track spreads out and becomes an impression rather than her standard narrative similar to Small Poppies on the first side. The guitars veer off into expansive Neil Young territory as Barnett repeats the same cluster of lyrics, echoing and unpacking the sentiment quoted above over and over until the track lands up where it started a la Marquee Moon with Barnett at home, inside, staring at an imagined watermark image of Jesus on the ceiling. It's one of those songs that lasts a while but passes in a moment and seems to hold back time while it's playing. The kind you put on again when it's over so that's what I'm doing now.
And so to Boxing Day Blues a smaller thing, but a perfectly formed album closer, not a million miles from Patti Smith's Elegie from Horses in mood and feel. Its lyric introduces a house with an open door and seems to be another love letter to Barnett's partner and it seems as if you're intruding on a private moment. Then the record's over.
Buy it. It's very good. Barnett and her band (whose role in the overall sound and feel of the record should not be understated, though I haven't gone into that aspect of the record sufficiently here), have created something that will last and seems sure to deepen their fan base, critical standing and not least I hope their individual and collective bank balances. All three would be deserved realisations. I know I'll play the record for years to come and it will continue to mean a lot to me. I may come back and tinker with this review as I do. Courtney Barnett is gifted and a great gift. I'm grateful to her and look forward to seeing her play next Tuesday in Newcastle. After which, I'll report back again.
