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 psychedelia—the 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 time—Simpler 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 ourselves—a 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 band—Dave Mudie, Dan Luscombe, and Bones Sloane—that 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 called—a 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 point—nothing 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.
