'You know what they say. No-one's born to hate. We learn it somewhere along the way. Take your broken heart. Turn it into art. Can't take it with you. Can't take it with you...'
First a disclaimer. Courtney Barnett is probably my favourite contemporary artist. I feel like I know her, which is one of her great gifts. Over the last five years since I first heard Avant Gardener, she's given me an enormous amount of pleasure and no little sustenance as she's travelled from a small time indie singer songwriter and frontwoman for her band in Melbourne to a known force currently making inroads and friends and inevitably detractors wherever she's decided to go as she gains a wider audience.
And so to her second album Tell Me How you Feel out yesterday. It's a shorter record than 2015's Sometimes I Sit And Think, Sometimes I Just Sit the debut which broke her big. I think it's a better one. She's certainly moved away from the narrative songs which marked that record to an inner space which tries to resolve her own evident inner discord while maintaining simplicity, sincerity and lyrical guile and dealing with the arseholes she comes across along the way as best she can. Seeking greater resonance while all the time ensuring she maintains her grace and not taking on meanness in response to the meanness she comes across. Just look at the feedback under The Guardian review of Tell Me for ample evidence of this.
It's a fine balancing act she's undertaking and on Tell Me I think she's done it. The ten tracks here are thoughtful, melodic and sweet, if troubled. She's moving on as an artist, has written several career best songs, kept what was already wonderful about her and supplemented it with greater depth and emotive power.
Nirvana is the obvious touchstone for the angrier songs here as they were from the start with Courtney and her three-piece band. On Hopefulness and I'm Not Your Mother I'm Not Your Bitch and Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Self Confidence, In Utero is definitely a starting point, but the end destination is all Courtney's own. In some ways she's gone back to her early simplicity as a way of forging forward and I think that's exactly the right move.These songs don't detonate as Nirvana's later ones often did in unresolved pain, grief and rage. They stay afloat.
So while Courtney's troubled, she's still grounded in friends, family and community in a way Kurt sadly never seemed to be. She's still got a wonderful way with words, a delivery that's warm and affecting, and no little skill as a guitarist, (perhaps her least appreciated talent). These seem like ten friends to get to know and there's nothing on here I'm uneasy with or I think is a false move, the result of overthinking, something she probably was guilty of on occasion on Sometimes I Sit and Think...
The band placed the lead off single from Tell Me last night on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon as part of the album launch in New York last night. The record seems set to shift in large numbers and Courtney's star will surely ascend yet further. If she seems uneasy with this course, (who can blame her?), I'd say she's taken the right approach with Tell Me. Keep it close to home, (final track Sunday Roast well and truly drive this point home), keep it real and try to make it more real, the next step on the journey as the road broadens. It gives more than enough and keeps you wanting more.
In summary, it's a fine record that occasionally howls but maintains its manners and an uneasy smile on its face. This should be another great year for Courtney and she very much deserves it. And for my friend Darran who turned down the opportunity to see her with me in a small venue in Newcastle a few years back, she still doesn't brush her hair and is all the better for it. And she won't ever be back there again...
'Don't come with your arms swinging. Throw them around me...'
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