Offhand observations mingle with understated insights, a nice trick of songwriting that the music cannily mirrors. Barnett's thick Australian accent carries an unstated pride for her homeland, but her sly twists of phrase, alternately wry and melancholic, give a greater sense of place, time, and character. So, Barnett might be part of a long line of underground rock troubadours but, as always, what matters is her specificity. Certainly, those flurries of six-string fury do recall a variety of indie rock from the '90s, an era when there was a surplus of guitar-friendly singer/songwriters, and if Sometimes I Sit does occasionally seem reminiscent of Liz Phair's landmark Exile in Guyville, it also seems to go back even further, sometimes suggesting the twitchy nerves of the former pub rockers who cranked up the volume and sharpened their invective in the wake of punk. By almost any measure, Barnett is a traditionalist - a singer/songwriter supported by a guitar-bass-drum trio, cranking out ballads and squalls of noise. falls into a long, storied rock tradition but never feels beholden to it. A little life is plenty.A convincing argument that rock & roll doesn't need reinvention in order to revive itself, Courtney Barnett's full-length debut Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit. Instead she slips into a refrain of how much it might cost to tear the house down and build a new one, which she repeats over and over again, until the memory of the shower is gone. She mentions them once and doesn't linger because she knows there's no point-nothing she could add to the image would make it sadder than it is. Barnett takes us into the neighborhood, into the house, into the sad little details that make her seem like a writery-writer: the picture of a young soldier, the safety rail in the shower. "Depreston", it's called-a quiet, countryish ballad that breaks up the noise around it. Sometimes I Sit's most sentimental song is that house-hunting one. 2015, she seems like an anomaly: A young songwriter who is smart but not intellectual, humble but not wimpy, into the past but not theatrical about it, aware of her feelings and aware of how too many feelings makes everyone bored. I don't know how things are in Barnett's Australia, but here in the U.S., A.D. If all this seems a little heady in discussion, it's to the credit of Barnett and her band-Dave Mudie, Dan Luscombe, and Bones Sloane-that it doesn't sound that way on record. In the end, Barnett returns invariably to herself, a subject she finds hard enough to understand. Even the album's biggest moments grow from small places, like the washed-up seal corpse in "Kim's Caravan" that spins out into a meditation on mortality, pollution, what it means to be stewards to our environments and to ourselves-a mental crescendo matched by a band that keeps ebbing deeper into feedback. To paraphrase the composer and philosopher John Cage, Barnett has nothing to prove and she's proving it.ĭoting too seriously on Sometimes I Sit misses what I take to be Barnett's point: Life is but a dream, tra la la, whatever. "I just know what I know," she recently told The New York Times "I think I'm shit some days, and some days I think I'm pretty good," she told Grantland. An ease surrounds her music, a looseness: Even at their most clever, her songs glide from line to line and thought to thought, a stray observation about cracks in the walls leading to something about the wrinkles in Barnett's own palm, propelled by rock'n'roll that seems to find itself plenty serviceable but nothing to stop and fuss over. Milne, is sometimes credited with the line from which Barnett takes her record's name. Half the time, she doesn't even sing, but talks, slipping into melody mid-line as though she just remembered she was playing music.Ī young writer with a working sense of humor and no apparent agenda, Barnett seems like a throwback to a simpler time-Simpler Times being less a period in history than a fictional place visited through fairytales, Buddhist anecdotes, and characters like Winnie the Pooh, whose creator, A. Without her words, the music would sit there without the music, Barnett would drift away. Its music is descended from 1990s grunge, descended in turn from '60s garage and psychedelia-the rocks to the balloons of Barnett's thoughts, which blow back and forth above the distorted guitars buoyed by gas we can't actually see. Sit is Barnett's first album, the follow-up to two EPs collected on a Barnettily-titled product called The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas.
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