COURTNEY BARNETT

Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit

Sometimes Courtney Barnett riffs like Kim Deal from the Breeders, and sometimes she just riffs. Words and guitar, she's got it all. Melbourne-based Barnett has been likened to totems of femme rock past, and the 27-year-old has had Bob Dylan comparisons flung her direction since double EP A Sea Of Split Peas launched her in 2013 as a charmingly intuitive wordsmith. Her Avant Gardener was a radio hit, and this debut LP with its word-count-munching title delivers on all the early promise. The beauty lies in the detail, from office job-bunking male character Oliver Paul in the opening Elevator Operator, telling his story from a tower block roof ("I'm not suicidal, just idling insignificantly/ I come up here for perception and clarity/ I like to imagine I'm playing Sim City"). Pedestrian At Best begins with a squall of feedback - a likely reference to Cannonball by Deal's Breeders - and becomes a grungy self-deprecating romp, with Barnett's word-flow recalling REM's It's The End Of The World..., that fast, fluent and eminently quotable. Depreston has Barnett and her girlfriend house-hunting in Melbourne suburbia. A dry topic, you'd suppose, but the mundane is flipped on its head in these magical hands.

9/10 — JOHN SKILBECK