Album Review: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, By Courtney Barnett

A witty wordsmith with a penchant for punnery, Courtney Barnett has become Australia’s unlikeliest hit musical export since Sia.

Courtney Barnett has a way with words. Now, anyway.

In 2013 she caused a minor storm in a ‘Ye cup by covering Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead” on Triple J, misappropriating some of the more racially incendiary language in an unwittingly insensitive manner.

The controversy didn’t follow her far, and certainly not to the United States, where her ingeniously hummable single “Avant Gardener” earned her the adulation of the musical taste-makers at Pitchfork, who blessed the track by declaring it the 49th best song of the year. (“Black Skinhead”, for a final insult, didn’t even crack their Top 100.)

Two years later, to celebrate the release of her album Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, Barnett’s being profiled in the New York Times and given four minutes to perform on Ellen.

And here we were still thinking that Sia’s welcome ascent to pop ubiquity was unlikely. Barnett’s seemed downright impossible, “voice of a generation” designations be damned.

The 27-year-old singer-songwriter has made her name not by belting torch songs and future karaoke classics but instead by documenting autobiographical vignettes with disarming humour and seemingly simple musical accompaniment. On this, her first album, the more banal the stories are, the better they apparently served as inspiration.

However, the music is only secretly simple. “Aqua Profunda”, all about a flirtation gone awry at a Fitzroy swimming pool, mimics the backbeat of “Girls Like That” by Custard (the beloved ‘90s alt-Australian band, with whom Barnett shares much in common). The swirling, psychedelic guitars of “Dead Fox” herald a tune in which Barnett muses about organic vegetables, her mind eventually wandering to the trucks transporting them, leaving “a possum Jackson Pollock… painted in the tar.” The chorus is a bumper sticker turned irrepressible refrain: “If you can’t see me, I can’t see you.”

Her low-key singing style is also deceptively complex; witty turns of phrase designed to latch onto your head through idiosyncratic delivery. Listen to how she suddenly, harmonically coos “deceased estate” after sing-speaking the rest of her mournful housing-price lament “Depreston.” Even the intricately-worded song titles were built to be remembered: “Elevator Operator.” “Debbie Downer.” “Pedestrian at Best.”

That last song is a stream-of-consciousness mission statement in which Barnett howls, “I’m a fake, I’m a phoney, I’m awake, I’m alone, I’m homely, I’m a Scorpio!” (As if The Breeders had been given a thesaurus.) Lines like these make you wonder if reading the lyric book would do the same job as listening to the record, but that’s discounting Barnett’s performances. Words were made to be said, and on Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, you’re convinced most words were made to be said by Courtney Barnett.

4/5

Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit is now available.