Good God. Me too, Courtney. Me too.
Courtney Barnett opens her debut full length with the urgent and immediately shared worry over Oliver Paul's thick head of hair and the probability of its eventual baldness, and also how "he's dropping soy linseed vegemite crumbs everywhere." He is our champion before he's finished his breakfast. When the time comes - and it comes sooner than we expect - we tear our ties from our necks and we raise them with Oliver, singing "I'm not going to work today/gonna count the minutes that the trains run late!" (Because, shit, every dream's a good dream, right John Darnielle?)
That first song ends on a rooftop, our hero imagining street life as Sim City and otherwise gaining perception and clarity when the second track interrupts, blistering with guitars and the album's best fist-chant warning about places like rooftops: "Put me on a pedestal and I'll only disappoint you!" Courtney Barnett has a talent for bending and stretching and screaming and ignoring a phrase all at the same time. Like she's daring us to be disappointed. One track later it's same dare, but lonelier, hung through with the probing-sluggish way we talk when we lay awake at three, blinking at minutiae. We're thinking of you too.
***
That dare is what makes "DePreston" so immediate; such arresting first impression/depression. Suddenly we're ensconced in the minutiae of house-hunting with a too-specific financial discussion obscuring the fact it wasn't our idea to look out further. That percolator is saving us $23 a week. Oliver Paul probably worries about the same things when he steps down from the roof. We retreat to brass tacks:
CB: And it's going pretty cheap you say?
RE Agent: Well it's a deceased est-ay-ay-ate.
RE Agent: Aren't the pressed metal ceilings great?
"Deceased est-ay-ay-ayte" is the only line Courtney Barnett arches on the entire album. It sounds like an eye-roll, at least in part because who gives a shit about pressed metal ceilings? People lived here with a handrail in the shower and old kitchenwares "and a photo of a young man in a van in Vietnam." And it's so stupid but it's hard not to wonder something about who they were and how they lived and with what beyond that handrail for support. "I wonder what she bought it for?" It's not the thing we want to ask; it's the thing we know how to ask. Inquiry and Oliver, idling insignificantly.
Guitars spread across the landscape and then they look out further. There is life in this home that we are poorly equipped to discover. Maybe there is too much of it.
If you've got a
spare half a million
you could knock it down and start rebuilding.
