Honestly, I can’t wait to see her at the end of May at the Roxy! Courtney Barnett is the talk of the blogosphere right now and personally I can’t get enough of her last single ‘Pedestrian at Best’, as this is such a badass piece which aggresses all your senses in the most euphoric way,… Never since Dylan or Nick Cave (well, I had to mention him because she is Australian too) I had absorbed so many words per second. She throws them at your face with her disillusioned-angry tone, while the hooky riff takes you at the throat and doesn’t let you breathe till the end of the song. Honestly, how do you come up with such an addictive tune? Driven by an irresistible energy, the song is a mix of self-deprecation and fuck-off attitude, ‘Put me on a pedestal and I’ll only disappoint you/Tell me I’m exceptional, I promise to exploit you/Give me all your money, and I’ll make some origami, honey/I think you’re a joke, but I don’t find you very funny’ she sings in the chorus. But she also goes though every state of mind possible ‘I like you, despise you, admire you’, and continues to enchant with her exhilarating verbal diarrhea: ‘I’m resentful, I’m having an existential time crisis/Want bliss, daylight savings won’t fix this mess/Under-worked and over-sexed, I must express my disinterest/The rats are back inside my head, what would Freud have said?’ Isn’t it awesome?
I had already been hooked on her previous hit song ‘Avant Gardener’, which my favorite radio played all summer-long. It had such an interesting ambiance, filled with sleepy guitars distorted in reverb, coma-induced vocals, and floored-by-the-heat ennui… there was something so good and so atmospheric about this song, that I had to notice. She had this to say about her writing process in an interview with DIY mag: ‘I draw a lot, and a lot of the songs and ideas come from those drawings. I elaborate on them more and they turn into something else.’ And this fascinates me because her songs are very visual, obsessed by many details of the everyday life, and she manages to transform a gardening session during a heat wave, into a drug-induced syncope:
‘My hands are shaky/My knees are weak/I can’t seem to stand/On my own two feet/I’m breathing but I’m wheezing/Feel like I’m emphysemin’/My throat feels like a funnel/Filled with weet bix and kerosene and/Oh no, next thing I know/They call up triple o/I’d rather die than owe the hospital/Till I get old/I get adrenalin/Straight to the heart/I feel like Uma Thurman/Post-overdosing kick start’… and it continues like this for the whole song, I actually could have taken any part of the song, the whole thing sounds like one unique stream of exhaustion.
And you know the best part of this? Everything seems to come easy to Courtney, as she explained in the same interview: ‘Pedestrian at Best’ I kind of came up with at the last minute. I showed the riff to the band and we kind of jammed on it; but I couldn’t think of a melody, or a chorus, or any lyrics at all. When we recorded it I just set down a structure, and wrote the lyrics later that night, to the music. It’s how I did [EP single] ‘Avant Gardener’ too, and a few other times. It feels like you’re working on a song that’s already been written. You have the luxury to sing over the top of it. It’s kind of fun to do it that way.’
Some blogs got me all excited because they announced an advanced streaming of her new album ‘Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit’ on Soundcloud, unfortunately it is not available in the US yet, but it should be soon!
The album will be available on March 24th via Mom + pop Records and here is the tracklist:
Elevator Operator
Pedestrian at Best
An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in NY)
Small Poppies
Depreston
Aqua Profunda!
Dead Fox
Nobody Really Cares if You Don’t Go to the Party
Debbie Downer
Kim’s Caravan
Boxing Day Blues
But scroll down, by the time you’ll read this you should be able to stream the album in its entirety below.