In one sense, every Courtney Barnett album is the same: it always feels like she\u2019s giving you a look inside her head. Her songs feel unfiltered and unguarded, again and again, and that\u2019s part of the appeal. Another piece of the puzzle is the way her disarming openness and vulnerability is balanced by the prickly Aussie sarcasm she wields like a surgeon.<\/p>\n
With Barnett, each song is an adventure because there aren\u2019t really any rules; there\u2019s just Courtney being herself and the rest of the world trying to keep up. On her initial EPs and first full album, the music is mostly as simple and unfiltered as her persona; there\u2019s no artifice or stage dressing to it, just her aggressive, chunky guitar plus bass and drums. On her second and third LPs, her pensive, melodic side moved closer to the forefront, and her most recent album\u2014the instrumental documentary soundtrack End Of The Day<\/i>\u2014felt like the purest distillation of that element with its dreamy, contemplative instrumental guitar snippets.<\/p>\n
Barnett\u2019s return to rock and roll with Creature Of Habit<\/i> offers evidence of her continuing musical evolution, full of expansions and embellishments of her initial core sound. The difference is evident from the album\u2019s opening notes: electronic percussion, a.k.a. just about the last thing you might expect to hear opening a Courtney Barnett album. As the song takes shape, though, building out with more typical guitar, bass and acoustic drums, you get a clearer sense of what she\u2019s going for; it\u2019s sassy, quirky and brave, adjectives that are absolutely characteristic for Barnett.<\/p>\n
The difference here is that she\u2019s trying out fresh sounds and making some different choices in the arrangements, presumably with the encouragement of her production team of John Congleton (Lana Del Ray, St. Vincent and many more), Stella Mozgawa (Barnett, Warpaint) and Marta Salogni (Sharon Van Etten, Kim Deal and many more).<\/p>\n
Opener \u201cStay In Your Lane\u201d also features fat, dirty, distorted bass courtesy of Zach Dawes, alongside angular and rather discordant electric guitar from Barnett. The instruments sound like they\u2019re quarreling with each other at times, and in fact the song\u2019s multi-tracked vocals seem to be acting out an argument that Barnett is having inside her own head. This jangly tension dissipates for \u201cWonder,\u201d a gentle, melodic tune about feeling self-conscious that she sings with a touch less of her normal deadpan. The thing is, even that change just makes her more open and interesting.<\/p>\n
\u201cSite Unseen\u201d features special guest Waxahatchee doubling what might be the most Courtney Barnett line ever: \u201cIt might take a while for me to get my head together.\u201d That\u2019s kind of her whole thing right there; she\u2019s someone who doesn\u2019t quite have it together, but is constantly working on it. \u201cSite\u201d is an easy-flowing mid-tempo number that\u2019s appealing and charming right down to the titular pun.<\/p>\n
Batting cleanup, \u201cMostly Patient\u201d is a favorite, a calm and considered character study of a loved one who\u2019s sometimes impatient, but mostly patient, set to the sort of silvery, understated guitar featured on End Of The Day<\/i>. Closing out Side A (as labeled on the lyric sheet), chunky, punchy \u201cOne Thing At A Time\u201d gives two-dimensional life to Barnett\u2019s ADHD, a multiple-personalitied tune about how her mind is always spinning in several directions and at once. Fittingly, as the music achieves maximum chaos, Barnett sings of being ready for a change, and the second she sings the word \u201cchange,\u201d the music downshifts to a calmer, warmer moment, temporarily, before building to a churning guitar solo.<\/p>\n
Side B opens with \u201cMantis,\u201d an upbeat, pushing number with a nice bassline (played by Bones Sloane this time), but calmer guitar. In early days, Barnett\u2019s aggressive guitar work would stand in contrast with her laconic vocals; here, the guitar is laconic as well, with the bass doing most of the work in terms of propulsion. \u201cSugar Plum\u201d follows with a callback to \u201cOne Thing At A Time\u201d as Barnett talks about feeling like you’re drowning in those moments when life is coming at you too fast to keep up. Its crinkly guitar-pop feel and woo-woos made me think of Fleetwood Mac, though that could also be because one of its refrains is \u201cover my head\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cSame\u201d is ironically the most uncharacteristic track yet, opening with electronic percussion leading to a dreamy chorus whose vocal arrangement could almost be called lush\u2014and then the New Wave synths enter (!). It\u2019s different, but works. The cheeky \u201cGreat Advice\u201d has a more familiar musical frame\u2014chunky guitar and sardonic lyrics\u2014as Barnett sings with familiar deadpan flair: \u201cAppreciate your great advice \/ And I need your opinion like a needle in the eye \/ I like it this way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Closer \u201cAnother Beautiful Day\u201d feels both familiar and surprising. Barnett has a way of making the slightly discordant beautiful, as her gentle yet raw guitar does here. But then her production team throws her typical naturalistic sonic palette out the window and drenches her vocals in echo, playing that off against the unadorned rawness of the guitar, bass, and drums, and it works. It\u2019s a pretty song about being present in the moment and appreciating what you have, that eventually moves into an expansive guitar solo, one where the notes feel like they\u2019re slightly off kilter, yet the progression works perfectly. It\u2019s a weird kind of genius. but one nonetheless, that leads to a breakdown and dreamy outro.<\/p>\n
Creature Of Habit <\/i>feels like a purposefully ironic title for an album that finds Courtney Barnett experimenting with fresh sounds and approaches. And while the experiments can feel jarring at first blush, Barnett is doing what artists are supposed to do: she\u2019s evolving. I love the spiky, relentlessly acerbic early Barnett\u2014and I also love this new version that doesn\u2019t hesitate to go dreamy and melodic and sincere. She never loses her essential edge, she just progresses it into the next iteration of her musical self. Glad to meet you, New Courtney.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":35491,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[9627],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-47388","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-courtney-barnett","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/47388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/47388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=47388"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=47388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}