Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit

ALBUM REVIEW Courtney Barnett | Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit | [Mom + Pop / Milk! / Marathon]

Artist: Courtney Barnett | Origin: Sydney, Australia | Current Residence: Melbourne, Australia | Previous Works: The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas | Spirit Animal: Sloth | Play This If… you want to find the fascination in monotony

Courtney Barnett does not have it all together. Her permanent bedhead is corralled by a swell of dirt brown bowl-cut bangs. Her wardrobe is a summer camp chic esthetic of tees and jeans (when she’s not wearing a clown suit). Her meal routine probably goes something like this: Hot Pocket for breakfast, Sour Patch Kids for lunch and cold cereal for dinner. “Put me on a pedestal, I’ll only disappoint you,” she promises on the first single from her lovably loopy album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. It’s a wonderfully playful jab at her fans, her critics, and her own ego, and it’s one of many self-deprecating witticisms that punctuate the work of this frazzled underground rocker from Down Under on the rise.

The Phil-Aussie-pher Make no mistake, despite her own protestations otherwise, Courtney Barnett is a present-day philosopher, one whose words should not only be ROFLed about, but heeded with serious contemplation. Courtney Barnett is a martyr for monotony, an advocate of average, an empress of the everyday. She dishes flurries of observations in a delicious bone-dry deadpan, leaving a wake of wicked insights in her nonchalant warpath. Much historical attention has been paid to persons in the first half of her album title – the sitters and thinkers. Rodin’s The Thinker comes to mind. Socrates ordained, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” We hear on the radio and see posted on blogs the great isms and great quotables of the great thinkers. But what about all of the not-so-great thoughts along the way? What purpose do they serve? Lead single “Pedestrian at Best” is less a song title than it is a mission statement: Barnett’s MO is to celebrate the un-celebrated moments of being. She seems captivated, at times paralyzed, by the glory of being alive, even if it is “just” sitting. She has the secret gift; the power to find the drama in the mundane and the enlightenment in the ordinary. Sometimes I Sit... begins with “Elevator Operator”: the unextraordinary account of an unextraordinary man named Oliver Paul with a “thick head of hair / [who] worries he’s going bald.” It’s “A Day in the Life” rewritten in the 21st century - dragging a comb across his head and making the bus in seconds flat. But instead of going to work, Mr. Paul donates his tie to a homeless man and dedicates the rest of his day to “building pyramids out of Coke cans.” The song is Barnett in gifted storyteller mode of the rambling vein. Every line is a breathless sidewinder in Salinger tone, and half the fun is just keeping up.

Hereditary Music Gene Expression The first thing anyone notices about Barnett when listening to her music is that she is an Aussie through-and-through. The accent is unapologetic, front-and-center. And she doesn’t sing so much as sigh, mumble, yelp, and converse her way through songs; a stream of conscious diarrhea without the nasty connotations. Sonically, Barnett melds the best parts of Nirvana’s In Utero pop-adroit distortion (listen: “Pedestrian at Best” vs. “Serve the Servants”), Neil Young’s first-take “Ditch Trilogy,” and Real Estate’s charming guitar chime (listen: “Depreston” vs. “Had to Hear”). She attributes her dry wit and black sense of humor to being raised on Monty Python and Fawlty Towers.

2013’s “Avant Gardener” introduced many to the young Aussie as an asthmatic flower child well-versed in acid-tongued mid-tempo ditties. But Sometimes I Sit displays impressive dynamic range, especially welcome given the limitations that can accompany her brand of speak-singing. “An Illustration of Loneliness,” and “Pedestrian at Best” are all low end and edgy guitar squall. Highlights “Small Poppies” and “Kim’s Caravan” are both heavyset seven minute dirges lush with open spaces and crushing self-consciousness: “I don’t know quite who I am, oh but man I am trying.” To contrast, sheer pop rockers like “Aqua Profonda!,” “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party” and “Debbie Downer” cast the back half of the album in a warm glow. There is no lack for emotional breadth, and key to each song’s impact is the album’s deft pacing.

Scatterbrains and Goosebumps Sitting down with Sit and Think is a gleeful exercise in purpose-unpacking and meaning-making. Marking every pithy aside and seeming non sequitur is a road sign - Yield: life’s little insights ahead. Some are buried deep, some in plain sight. “An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepness in New York)” is a true traveling musician’s love song – warbling “I’m thinking of you too” in between surreal thoughts of palmistry brought on by intercontinental insomnia. “Dead Fox” explores the merits of organic vegetables, and the hidden connection between art and roadkill (“a possum Jackson Pollock is painted on the tire”). “Nobody Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party,” as abundantly clear in the title, captures time’s corrosion of peer pressure, a eulogy to #FOMO. In second single, “Depreston,” and its Google Maps music video, picking out floorboards in a new suburban home never sounded more soul-sucking. Perhaps the more subversive messages Barnett drives home are those about humanity’s corrupt, complicated relationship with nature. dying seals washed ashore and a no-longer-Great Barrier Reef (“Kim’s Caravan”). Her strength is how she frames these heavy subjects – with the simple language and curious wisdom of a child: "Guess [the seal] just wants to die / I would wanna die too / With people putting oil into my air / But to be fair, I’ve done my share." Then there’s the part that gives me goosebumps. Further into “Kim’s Caravan,” in three simple phrases, and without stating it explicitly, Barnett taps into the heart of humanity’s (and the individual’s) relationship with art: "Don’t ask me what I really mean / I am just a reflection of what you really wanna see / So take what you want from me." To ask about Courtney Barnett’s intentions behind a certain lyric is to miss the point. Like many artists before her, she distances herself from objectivity and absolutes, casting herself as the impartial vessel, a mirror for others to glimpse, to take away their own meanings, and drift along.

Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit is a scintillating first full-length, and if the hook to “Debbie Downer” is any indication, Ms. Barnett is not finished yet, so all we should all keep listening.

Noggin Nuggets Lyrics and turns of phrase that capture the album’s raison d'etre.

I used to hate myself but now I think I’m all right - “Small Poppies”

I wanna go out but I wanna stay home - “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party”

I’m growing older every time I close my eyes / Boring, neurotic everything that I despise - “Debbie Downer”

Don’t ask me what I really mean / I am just a reflection of what you really wanna see / So take what you want from me - “Kim’s Caravan”