Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit it really is one of those albums (the very same, also applies to A Sea of Split Peas) that makes you want to spin it round and round while indulgently sipping some tequila with lime juice, brown sugar and crumbled ice while the fan wheel revolves some fresh air in the warm lounge in a late afternoon. It is almost a physical impossibility not to fall in love with the album song after song, spiral after spiral.
This is the kind of album that gets stuck into your head in such a way that it travels you everywhere risking becoming a kind of second skin. How can you avoid the urge to suddenly begin singing “Don’t jump little boy, don’t jump off that roof, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you’re still in your youth, I’d give anything to have skin like you!” in the middle of the traffic jam? Or "My internal monologue is saturated analogue, It’s scratched and drifting, I’ve become attached to the idea it’s all a shifting dream bitter-sweet philosophy" when you plunge in your machinery of thoughts at the end of the day, but also "I wanna go out but I wanna stay home"
when your girl wants to go out socialize and all you want is to watch football on TV and stuff yourself in beer and fried chips? You can't.
Just for the record Courtney Barnett’s exhilarating debut album hit the recording studio in April 2014 at Head Gap, Melbourne though the finishing details were delayed mostly due to the massive touring and finally released on March 20 coinciding with her North American tour plenty with highly awaited acclaimed gigs at SXSW 2015.
This album is the perfect testimonial from a musician that breathes' talent, but most of all from a person searching the right bias between the times of clinical depression, high anxiety and a sudden, though very consistent and physically demanding success through massive touring and media attention, which kept Courtney Barnett out of her natural comfy environment, friends and girlfriend Jen Cloher for weeks in a row. So it’s more than natural that when one gets deeper and deeper on this album one inevitably confronts with someone who deals with the normal up and down the emotional escalator, someone who gets worried, thoughtful, saddened and happy to the extreme and shares it within songs.
Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit offers a set of eleven masterfully crafted songs enhanced with a musicality that grabs you right on spot needless to say that Courtney Barnett reveals herself as a tremendous guitar player with a very peculiar technique. She never uses a pick but fingering and contrary to what we maybe think of this does not stop her from switching between musical genres spanning from dreamy melodies to pop grunge, alt country and psych rock.
Music media really loves to label everything making it more identifiable for the public assuming that the labeling is anyhow the equivalent to a great scientific discovery or a first step of man on the moon. One believes that the sustainable though somehow surprisingly sudden success of Courtney Barnett’s music left many critics and music journalists a bit confused and one knows how these people like to feel assured of what they say and write but also make some orthodox doctrine about their intellectual masturbation.
The press was fast in cataloging Courtney Barnett music as «slacker» which is quite an inappropriate term to apply to her music considering the term generally suggests some lethargic state of mind, non participation, apathy and aimlessness, some sort of alienated deep uninterested for the sociopolitical causes. Slacker is a term that goes for underachievement which is quite the very opposite of what we can actually say about Courtney Barnett considering all the sustainable aspects emanating from the way she is building her career. Quite predictably then the music press simply considered that Courtney Barnett music exhaled deep unavoidable influence from all slacker rockers of the 90s just like she was merely emulating their work. And they did the very same because of the grungy tone and mood of “Pedestrian at Best” swearing that it got to be some Nirvana in it.
Why it has to be like that? Why not Magic Dirt or The Drones? It seems a bit myopic even insulting to consider Courtney Barnett’s music as maybe merely replication of her supposed influences. Considering all released material and not only her brutally addictive debut album one perceives that as a listener she consumed a lot of different sonic stuff. People may feel tempted to label Courtney Barnett is half Sheryl Crow, half Stephen Malkmus; half Liz Phair, half Pavement.
It’s easier to go for this let’s say more evident sonorities than to consider other less obvious but rather sustainable alternatives. It hardly seems deniable that Courtney Barnett soundscape ultimately feeds itself on some early 70s New York underground aesthetics. There’s so much of Lou Reed, so much of Tom Verlaine and Television, even some strong bits of Robert Quine in her music that all summed up helps one to picture her so called influences in a rather different approach.
We figure out that there is a strong presence of Evan Dando; The Lemonheads; Dan Kelly; Darren Hanlon and even of The Simpletons, in much of her material but most of all there is a huge influence of Jen Cloher on her music and last but not least of Patti Smith which spiritually floats over Courtney Barnett aesthetics subtly. If one goes through the albums Horses and Radio Ethiopia we easily understand tracks such like Small Poppies or Out of the Woodwork.
It is hugely rewarding to see that Courtney Barnett is much more than someone who releases nice music. She is somehow reconstructing and re configuring a musical thread by revisiting past generations of musicians that can really be a good help for the further deeper consolidation of her art which demands from the presumed critics an informed approach to her sonic inspiration.
As said a few paragraphs above Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit offers a very cohesive set of songs opening with Elevator Operator tells a story of man who likes to go to tall buildings at the same time as a woman on Botox that he meets on the elevator urges him not to throw himself out from the roof onto the pavement. This track brings some good and light power pop with steady guitar and bass with an effective drum pattern all relinquished with some Hammond style organ which give a pretty soulful vibe to this theme.
Pedestrian At Best, is generally a song about self-awareness of who you are and how you managed to get to where you are now. It’s a song in which past meets future in the uncertainty of what the present might represent. The garage punk song of the album awesomely energetic and inviting for the mosh pit with massive reverb noise guitars and enraged rhythm section. An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in NY) is mostly a song about Courtney Barnett's longing from her girlfriend due to sudden and drastic change of life habits and routines out of her natural environment due to the huge success of Sea of Split Peas which implied loads of gig ’n’ tour.
Another power pop song reminding some Luscious Jackson material, but enriched with a kind of funky sway and slightly distorted guitars with a Lou Reed/Robert Quine touch that marvelously lingers too through Small Poppies that tells us not only about resentment towards other people's talent and success as it seems to mostly be about the social phenomenon of domestic violence. The instrumental parts of this song leaves in the listener the feeling that the underground music scene from NY mid seventies landed in Melbourne. Fabulous track with all instruments on the right spot.
Depreston is in a way the midpoint song of the album and so far so good! It tells us about the hardships of nailing the perfect affordable dwell to live in Melbourne’s suburbs, and how each house has its previous life. An indie pop lovely tune with gentle guitar playing, melody and soloing reminding of some tunes from The Go-Betweens embellished with a gorgeous steady broomstick snare work. Aqua Profunda! Meaning “deep waters” is a summer song about someone trying to impress the next lane swimmer, but the outcome was not the desired one. The musicality of this theme has some cool, nice indie rock features mostly the rhythm section work with a very present drumming pattern and bass line colored with a guitar chopping which makes The Breeders come to mind.
This sort of Breeder-esque vibe is also present in Dead Fox is a well humored account about the way of the world concerning the quality of what we eat, short-term profit and greed over environmental issues of any order from animal rights to consumer health. The way the guitar and bass link together just like there were two lead guitars works amazingly and the perfect rock drumming does marvelous to the song as well as extending its tentacles onto Nobody Really Cares If You Don't Go to the Party which is a song dealing with the interaction issue between different personalities and reciprocity in relationships and the opposition between extroverts and introverts and how easily people ignore the differences preferring to condemn and reject them.
Debbie Downer is musically a happy song in spite of the lyric subject tells about someone depressing, non positive, that feeds on negativity. The opening of the song reminds The Doors “Light My Fire” keyboard part with a pretty interesting groove. Kim's Caravan, is a wonderful dark song about the duality of the human condition in general, we are light and darkness, good and evil, life and death, silence and noise, significance and insignificance. Musically the song has some background sonic landscape that perfectly emulates what would be someone/something slowly drowning in the depths while reverberating, magnificent guitars rise in steady blows reminding again the Lou Reed/Robert Quine guitar work. Fantastic.
Boxing Day Blues is a somehow enigmatic conversational style song about someone that isn't there for another when needed, a song about disillusionment and the defilement of a relationship. This is the closing song of the album and it closes it per opposition to the vibrant opening song. It somehow resembles some acoustic work of Robert Forster but mostly (still) of Lou Reed and his Perfect Day from the Transformer album. No, Boxing Day Blues does not sound to Perfect Day but the atmosphere and moody balance of Lou Reed’s song is all there. And it’s so cool.
One has already said enough about Courtney Barnett to conclude that we are in the presence of an extremely humble, down to earth person with dazzling talent in the artistry domain she has chosen to work. We're also convinced that her debut album will easily be in the top 20 of the 2015 best albums because it is in fact a great album with excellent songs and musical maturity that gives the listener the assurance of further development and experimentation.
When one goes through Courtney Barnett album if we are honest about it, we inevitably have to recognize that there are signs or hints of influences she has from other musicians (which is only natural) but we undoubtedly see the evidence of a personal style either in guitar playing, singing or songwriting. A proper aesthetic even if unintentionally.
The mundane euphoria concerning Courtney Barnett resides in the fact that she is original and must not be enrolled with the lot of girl bands just like she is one among many. By her own merit she entered without making too much fuss in the restricted group of top class women acts where for instance one also can spot: Anna Calvi, Catherine Anne Davies, Warpaint, St. Vincent, Jen Cloher, Chelsea Wolfe, And The Kids, Emily Jane White, Daisy Victoria, Marissa Nadler, Sarah Blasko or Sharon Van Etten to name just those who came to mind while we’re writing this article.
One of the most amazing features of Courtney Barnett is that not only she does have an incisive opinion about what is going on around the world, but she puts it with a certain laid back state of mind that may sound slackly, when in fact it is more like she was a kind of third party, someone who keeps distance to gain better focus and produce opinion with humor like she was the Sarah Silverman of electric guitar. Enough said, we are in the presence not of a new Bob Dylan like some like to call her, but right the contrary in the face of someone who reached the pedestal that only Courtney Barnett [all comparisons put aside] could have reach.
INDIEVOTION ranking for “Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit” is 9/10
