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a r t i s t :: Courtney Barnett
t i t l e :: Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit
d a t e :: 2015-00-00
l a b e l :: Marathon Artists
g e n r e :: Indie
s o u r c e :: CD
b i t r a t e :: 956 kbps avg
e n c o d e r :: FLAC 1.2.1 -8 -V
t r a c k s :: 11
p l a y t i m e :: 43:29
s i z e :: 294.8MB
tracklist
1 Elevator Operator 3:14
2 Pedestrian At Best 3:50
3 An Illustration Of Loneliness 3:10
(Sleepless in New York)
4 Small Poppies 6:59
5 Depreston 4:52
6 Aqua Profunda! 1:59
7 Dead Fox 3:33
8 Nobody Really Cares If You Don't Go To 2:46
The Party
9 Debbie Downer 3:17
10 Kim's Caravan 6:47
11 Boxing Day Blues 3:02
releasenotes
A young man adrift ditches work mid-commute... a swimmer passes out trying to
impress the person in the next lane... a couple goes house-hunting and ends up
peering into the life of a widow: These are just a few of the
ordinary-extraordinary moments captured on Courtney Barnett's Sometimes I Sit
and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. And like all moments, they pass,
sometimes with event but usually without. Not that event seems to matter
either way to Barnett, who shows up in her own songs like a bemused local
taking questions from a camera crew that rushed to the scene in hopes of
finding someone more interesting. "I had goggles on," she notes in the swimmer
song ("Aqua Profunda!"). "They were getting foggy/ I much prefer swimming to
jogging."
Sit is Barnett's first album, the follow-up to two EPs collected on a
Barnettily-titled product called The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas. Its music
is descended from 1990s grunge, descended in turn from '60s garage and
psychedeliaùthe rocks to the balloons of Barnett's thoughts, which blow back
and forth above the distorted guitars buoyed by gas we can't actually see.
Without her words, the music would sit there; without the music, Barnett would
drift away. Half the time, she doesn't even sing, but talks, slipping into
melody mid-line as though she just remembered she was playing music.
A young writer with a working sense of humor and no apparent agenda, Barnett
seems like a throwback to a simpler timeùSimpler Times being less a period in
history than a fictional place visited through fairytales, Buddhist anecdotes,
and characters like Winnie the Pooh, whose creator, A. A. Milne, is sometimes
credited with the line from which Barnett takes her record's name. An ease
surrounds her music, a looseness: Even at their most clever, her songs glide
from line to line and thought to thought, a stray observation about cracks in
the walls leading to something about the wrinkles in Barnett's own palm,
propelled by rock'n'roll that seems to find itself plenty serviceable but
nothing to stop and fuss over. "I just know what I know," she recently told
The New York Times; "I think I'm shit some days, and some days I think I'm
pretty good," she told Grantland. To paraphrase the composer and philosopher
John Cage, Barnett has nothing to prove and she's proving it.
Doting too seriously on Sometimes I Sit misses what I take to be Barnett's
point: Life is but a dream, tra la la, whatever. Even the album's biggest
moments grow from small places, like the washed-up seal corpse in "Kim's
Caravan" that spins out into a meditation on mortality, pollution, what it
means to be stewards to our environments and to ourselvesùa mental crescendo
matched by a band that keeps ebbing deeper into feedback. In the end, Barnett
returns invariably to herself, a subject she finds hard enough to understand.
If all this seems a little heady in discussion, it's to the credit of Barnett
and her bandùDave Mudie, Dan Luscombe, and Bones Sloaneùthat it doesn't sound
that way on record. I don't know how things are in Barnett's Australia, but
here in the U.S., A.D. 2015, she seems like an anomaly: A young songwriter who
is smart but not intellectual, humble but not wimpy, into the past but not
theatrical about it, aware of her feelings and aware of how too many feelings
makes everyone bored.
Sometimes I Sit's most sentimental song is that house-hunting one.
"Depreston", it's calledùa quiet, countryish ballad that breaks up the noise
around it. Barnett takes us into the neighborhood, into the house, into the
sad little details that make her seem like a writery-writer: the picture of a
young soldier, the safety rail in the shower. She mentions them once and
doesn't linger because she knows there's no pointùnothing she could add to the
image would make it sadder than it is. Instead she slips into a refrain of how
much it might cost to tear the house down and build a new one, which she
repeats over and over again, until the memory of the shower is gone. A little
life is plenty.
www.courtneybarnett.com.au
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Courtney_Barnett-Sometimes_I_Sit_And_Think_And_Sometimes_I_Just_Sit-(HA0036C