There’s no sophomore slump for Australian indie-rock star Courtney Barnett. Three years after her acclaimed debut — Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit — and less than a year after a collaborative album with Kurt Vile, the world-weary 30-year-old returns with Tell Me How You Really Feel. The confessional collection is truly a peek inside Barnett’s fascinating head, filled with many contradictory, and human, reactions to life’s complications. Barnett explores everything from raging neuroses to fleeting joy on toe-tapping tunes like “City Looks Pretty.” But it’s actually a quiet note that kicks off Tell Me How You Really Feel, with “Hopefulness,” a song that softly drips with anxiety and affirmations. The opener is the apolitical album’s post-political song, with Nelson Mandela’s famous line repeated: “Y’know what they say/No one’s born to hate/We learn it somewhere along the way.”
Barnett advocates for female empowerment in “I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch,” and “Nameless, Faceless”; the latter being a dark lament on toxic masculinity that weaves in one of writer Margaret Atwood’s most famous quotes: “Men are scared that women will laugh at them/I want to walk in the dark/Women are scared that men will kill them.” Barnett, openly gay, also directs ire to some of the women in her life, with brilliant kiss-off songs like “Charity,” “Need a Little Time,” and “Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Self Confidence.” It’s on songs like “Crippling” that Barnett’s love of ’90s rock-folk and the lo-fi sound of Liz Phair shine brightest.
There’s time for one more catchy self-improvement anthem, “Help Your Self,” before Barnett closes on a beautifully depressing note, with the relationship tales of “Walking on Eggshells” and “Sunday Roast.” In the melodic confessions of Tell Me How You Really Feel, Barnett does exactly that and the pleasure is all ours. (Milk! Records)
This article is a part of the 2018 June / July issue of Whole Life Times.