The word "slacker" usually conjures somebody who spends all day in front of the TV, but Courtney Barnett can do them all one better: Her TV has been broken for four years and she’s been too lazy to fix it. She reveals this detail and further underachiever credentials in a long, charismatically ambling song off her double EP A Sea of Split Peas, called "Are You Looking After Yourself." The song—which pairs a few jangly chords with Barnett’s lazy-Tuesday drawl—alternates between the questions of a concerned parent ("Are you working hard my darling?/ We’re so worried") and Barnett’s libertine responses ("I don’t want no 9 to 5/ Telling me that I’m alive/ And 'Man, you’re doing well!'"). About halfway through, Barnett’s guilty conscience emerges: Maybe she should get a job, or a husband, or at the very least a dog. But then the song goes on for another carefree three-and-a-half minutes, as if she’s put off these life decisions in favor of playing guitar a little while longer.
Barnett is 25 years old and from Melbourne, Australia; when she sings "My friends play in bands, they are better than everything on radio," she is likely referring to the roster of Milk Records, "a little independent label" she started running out of her bedroom last year. Milk’s first release was Barnett’s debut EP I’ve Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris, which she’s now combined with her 2013 EP How to Carve a Carrot into a Rose and re-released under the characteristically long-winded name The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas. The 12 songs in this collection are often wordy, articulate, and dazzlingly witty, but they’re always down-to-earth; Barnett comes across like a slightly less urbane Jens Lekman, or Eleanor Friedberger if her songs took place not in bustling cities but in small, sleepy towns. "It’s a Monday, it’s so mundane," Barnett sighs in a hilarious deadpan on Split Peas’ best song, "Avant Gardener". "What exciting things will happen today?"
The irony, though, is that the song soon becomes quite exciting. Barnett has a gift for turning mundane scenarios into gripping stories—she animates each one with genial asides and jokey tangents, like she’s recounting it for you at the pub later that night. "Avant Gardener" chronicles an ill-fated attempt to get some gardening done in a heat wave, and ends with Barnett having a panic attack in the back of an ambulance ("The paramedic thinks I’m clever cos I play guitar/ I think she’s clever cos she stops people dying.") Another standout, "History Eraser", has a similar momentum, but this time Barnett doesn’t even have to get out of bed: It describes a breathless, drunken daydream in which Barnett and the object of her affection joyride on a tractor, catch a riverboat to a casino, and spontaneously sprout straw where their hair used to be—all to the tune of some rollicking, 1960s-inspired folk. It might as well be called "Courtney Barnett’s 115th Dream".
As the more up-beat numbers prove, Barnett’s comically eponymous ("Courtney Barnett and the Courtney Barnetts") backing band complements her style perfectly: they match the frontwomans’ shambling energy without taking the emphasis off her clever lyrics. A few of Split Peas’ slower, older songs [“Porcelain”, “Canned Tomatoes (Whole)”] do stall the momentum, but Barnett herself says she didn’t conceive the collection as a cohesive statement. "I don’t want people to misinterpret it as an album," she said in a recent Pitchfork interview, "An album is a thing you take time out and go work on. I can’t wait to make an album. I’ve got a bunch of songs half-ready to go, and I might start on it early next year." Classic slacker rhetoric, maybe, but on this occasionally brilliant (pre-)debut Barnett proves there’s more to the stereotype than meets the eye. When you’ve got an imagination this wild, who even needs a TV?
