A Review by Michael Stone
On first listen, Courtney Barnett’s slacker classic “Avant Gardener” flows with a stream-like, associative haze, “I sleep in late / another day / oh what a wonder / oh what a waste.” The drums and bass revolve warmly around a few sneaky notes; the guitars, washed-out with reverb, ask more questions than they answer; but as we enter the world of Barnett’s breakout song, we realize we’re in the middle of a trip. The song itself isn’t about a drug trip, it’s about an asthma attack, but the illusive world-building happens so fast we might as well be in another state by the time we get to the middle of the first verse: “The yard is full of hard rubbish. It’s a mess and / I guess the neighbors must think we run a meth lab.”
When Courtney Barnett sings, especially on this early song and others of its era, she sounds like she just woke up from a nap — even her guitar-playing is apparently lazy — but all of this is deception. Courtney Barnett is the greatest new songwriter of the past 10 years. While she can make you laugh, as on “Avant Gardener,” or make you cry, as on “Depreston,” these facts by themselves do not a songwriter make. Courtney Barnett has what so few of her imitators do: a fiercely wrought style and point of view. Her rhymes are no accident, neither is her singing or her playing. No one in music has tried so hard to sound at ease as an outsider.
Stream-of-consciousness as a writing style has a reputation for being unedited nonsense, even laziness. But in history, the most apparently casual writers were intense critics of their own work. Let’s take John Ashbery as an example. He writes enigmatically unstable poems in which nothing is what it seems. He steals from everyday speech and subverts whatever meaning you might assign to his work as you’re reading it. But he honed his writing for years, revising heavily, before he ever published a book. Later, as he loosened up, he developed his trademark witty style, a confluence of form and whimsy. James Joyce, the modernist master (or abuser) of stream of consciousness, took 17 years to write his illegible masterpiece Finnegans Wake, a book literally imitating a stream flowing through a person’s mind.
Courtney Barnett is of a piece with these literary practitioners of stream-of-consciousness. Her work is loose and associative, but the rhymes and wordplay bely a sense of laziness. She’s also a masterful performer. I wonder how many hours of guitar-playing she’d been through before she hit on “Avant Gardener,” how many stacks of unused lyrics and melodic ideas before she wrote, in my opinion, the best song of her early success, “Depreston,” which is about buying a home.
Courtney Barnett followed Ashbery in loosening the lyrical reigns on her last album, Tell Me How You Really Feel, relying less on cleverness and more on point of view. She’s just announced her third full-length album Things Take Time, Take Time, due November 12. We’ll see if her grip continues to loosen or if she’ll imitate the lyrical density of her earlier work. Either way, the songs will be good, not because she’s funny or likes plants, but because she knows exactly what she’s doing.
Michael Stone is a poet from Kalamazoo, MI but the only way to read his work is to make him food. He works in youth development in Grand Rapids and makes music under the name Desert Golfer.