There are many aspects of Courtney Barnett’s music to admire: the quirky lyrics, the catchy riffs, the wry humour, and the manifest absence of ego. But above all, it’s the sheer ordinariness which makes the strongest impression.
It’s said the best books you read are the ones you wish you’d written yourself. When Barnett riffs on the northward drift of the housing affordability belt into Preston in ‘Depreston’, it resonates better than any egghead economist’s academic analysis. When she charts the journey of a suburban office worker in ‘Elevator Operator’, Barnett crystallises everything tedious we’ve ever imagined about the contemporary world.
Musically, you’re forever hearing melodies that seems vaguely familiar, almost seminal. A snippet of The Kinks rears its head in ‘Aqua Profunda!’, a flash of You Am I’s mod riffage appears in ‘Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party’, bubblegum Monkees garage seeps into ‘Debbie Downer’, and even some Kim Salmon blues-noir shows up in ‘Small Poppies’. These are the songs we all wish we’d composed in our garage, but only Barnett has the talent to do so.
Yet the ordinariness is deceptive. You don’t write a song like ‘Pedestrian at Best’, with its subtle post-modernist inflection, without baring deep insight into the cannibalistic tendencies of the music game.
In the late-‘90s, Regurgitator fired a preemptive strike against popular critique in ‘I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff’. Barnett comes at the challenge of expectation from another angle, lowering herself down the ladder of success before anyone has a chance to take a potshot in her direction.
On ‘Dead Fox’, Barnett wanders allegorically from hipster obsessions with organic food to Jackson Pollock roadkill: it could be casual musing, it could be political commentary, or it could just be great writing.
The last two tracks – ‘Kim’s Caravan’ and ‘Boxing Day Blues’ – are slight departures from the prevailing style of the record. The spacious and distant feel of the former barely disguises a confessional tone while the latter paints the consumerist obsessions and specious community rhetoric of the festive season.
While this album has already caused Courtney Barnett’s star to rise spectacularly, she isn’t a rock star: she’s just Courtney Barnett, and there isn’t anyone else like her.
