How can a sneer, a riff and a witty turn of phrase sound so fresh? They’ve been crucial ingredients for great rock for decades but Australia’s Courtney Barnett makes it sound new again with her disarming, offhand style.
The 26-year-old from Melbourne has sold out about every show she’s ever had in D.C. back from when she played DC9 to the Black Cat to this weekend’s big two night stand at The 9:30 Club.
By now she’s got such a command of what she’s doing she’s also incorporated her equally formidable skills in graphic arts that have made her album covers and posters so charming, creating (or at least overseeing) a kaleidoscope of swirling, personalized designs projected behind her trio — hand-drawn abstractions that accelerate as her band speeds up.
While her command empowers female fans glad to see a woman lead the way with guitar and smart lyrics, it’s still apparently an adjustment to some rock dudes, apparently, one of whom bellowed between songs in Sunday’s show: “Are you married?”
Barnett gave him a quizzical look. It was as odd as when somebody asked earlier how Bonnaroo was. “Fun,” she said, with the same odd look. “Thanks for asking.”
But marriage?
“It’s not that kind of show,” she said, pricelessly.
No, it’s just rocking, and stream of consciousness wry observations and tumbling landscapes of geometry behind her.
With a couple of EPS and one new album this year, Barnett has a lot of strong songs choose from but stuck largely to the same setlist she had played the night before, dominated by material from spring’s “Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit,” but including terrific earlier songs that got her her initial attention, “Avant Gardener,” about a health issue during a heatwave, and “History Eraser,” her final encore song.
Holding her righthanded electric upside-down and backward, the way the similarly left-handed Jimi Hendrix did, she splayed her fingers into commanding chords.
But it was more complex than it looked, as she was holding down the entire guitar sound for a trio that otherwise included Dave Mudie on drums and Bones Sloane on bass, a couple of bearded guys who kept the rhythm locked down.
Barnett doesn’t hold her guitar down and away from her body, but in tight so her shoulder is up. The shrug fits her funny, offhand comments in her songs. Her mid length brunette hair with bangs helped invite comparisons to Suzi Quatro, the Detroit rocker who also played Leather Tuscadero on “Happy Days,” an association Barnett might enjoy.
If she is carrying a banner, though, it’s not for gender advancements in rock, but for Aussie rock in general. The band took to the stage to the recorded sound of Midnight Oil’s baroque guitar intro to “Short Memory,” and in the encore, when she played solo for the only time in the set, covered “Heavy Heart,” the 1998 track by the Sydney band You Am I. That showed a couple of different sides to her all at once: That she could sing a ballad prettily if she wanted and also convincingly fingerpick her guitar if she so chose.
But this was not her general path. So the more telling cover was the Breeders’ “Cannonball,” which exuded the heaviness, simplicity and deadpan charm she shares with Kim Deal.
Many of Barnett’s songs, despite their outward simplicity, often have the depth of good short (very short) stories. In “Depreston,” she muses about moving out to be burbs and finds a place where someone died. Scraps of that woman’s life, and a shower handrail tell her story. Now the question is weather to tear the whole thing down.
In “Dead Fox,” she weighs the merits of organic vs. fruits with hidden pesticides and points to something larger in the chorus “If you can’t see me, I can’t see you,” the phrase from truck rear view mirrors she also uses to consider the roadkill on the highway.
It’s one of the songs whose verses are spoken, in a way Lou Reed did on “Walk on the Wild Side,” and nearly as effective.
In “Elevator Operator,” which opened the show just as it opens the album, a man decides to ditch work, goes up to the top of a building and is mistaken for a suicide candidate. Actually, he says, he’s “just idling insignificantly. I come up here for perception and clarity. I like to imagine I’m playing Sim City.”
There’s more drive in her live shows than on her fine recordings, mostly because minus the occasionally keyboard touches, or second guitar. And most of everything was upbeat, the big departure being the slow and snaky blues “Small Poppies,” which literally begins by watching the grass grow and later switches the reigning self-deprecation for acceptance at last: “I used to hate myself but now I think I’m alright.” Like everyone else, Courtney.
The opening band Chastity Belt might have been seen as a simpatico girl power booking, but that would only ignore history’s endless lineup of all-boy rock bands. As it is, they’re a four person group from Washington state, whose approach, as opposed to the opener, was more stuck in second gear, in a brooding, jangly mid-tempo songs with a steady beat whose songs can bite with feminist growl as in the opening “Drone,” about “just another man/trying to teach me something.”
