2015: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit - Courtney Barnett | Shadows in the Night - Bob Dylan

Looking back at 30 years of music | Courtney Barnett, Bob Dylan

Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit - Courtney Barnett

Some albums creep up on you and work their way into your spirit and being through repeated listenings; they're slow-burns which need to warm up before they fully reveal themselves and their genius to you.

Others kick off with a such a bang and pull you in from the very first seconds of the very first song. They let you know that you have just put on an album that is not going tolerate anything but your full attention.

The excellent Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit from Courtney Barnett is firmly in this latter camp. It doesn’t waste any time at all grabbing your attention. It doesn't pussy-foot around or wait for you to ready yourself for action.

There is no warning at the start of the first song; at the start of this album. We’re straight into the thick of it. There’s no instrumental movement before the story begins. Barnett’s voice just crashes into action alongside drums, bass, guitar and electric piano. It's as if the record has begun playing even before you've put the needle down, or hit play on your streaming service of choice.

And, from such a break-neck start, the song never lets up. Dave Mudie’s drums are relentless, as are the keys which add so much depth and colour to the music. For all the pace and energy that is evident, however, there is not much variation in the playing. The song gets stuck in its rhythm right off the bat, but that perfectly encapsulates and reflects the feelings of the young protagonist of the lyric, Oliver Paul (“twenty years old / thick head of hair, worries he's going bald”).

Stuck in a rut and sick of the routine, he is a worrier who has had enough of it all already. The song starts out as a simple day in the life story (“Wakes up at quarter past nine, fare evades his way down the 96 tram line / breakfast on the run again, he's well aware he's dropping soya linseed Vegemite crumbs everywhere”), but before long we realise this is not just another ordinary day in his life, after all.

Oliver Paul, feeling sick at the sight of his computer, reaches a place that we’ve all been to when faced with the prospect of yet another day at the office and screams, “I’m not going to work today!”.

Instead, he rips off his tie; makes his way downtown and up to the top of the Nicholas building. In the elevator up, he’s looked over by the well-off woman next to him (“Hair pulled so tight you can see her skeleton / Vickers perfume on her breath, a tortoise shell necklace between her breasts”) and then, once they reach the summit, is implored by her not to jump from the rooftop.

She's got him wrong. He's tired of carrying on, but not like that. In his retort, “I think you're projecting the way that you're feeling / I'm not suicidal, just idling insignificantly”, Barnett perfectly encapsulates the deflated and wearied feelings of so many young people who reach a certain age and realise the size of the world and their place in it; who realise that they likely have a whole mundane life ahead of them, filled with boring problems and work and things that they’d rather not be doing. There is so much chance for adventure and wonder and magic in our world and in our lives, and yet we have to spend so much of it idling in the office, instead. They don’t want to end things, but they do wish they didn’t feel like such an insignificant part of the bigger picture.

Oliver Paul explains his position further (“I like to come up here for perception and clarity”, “and the wind’s the only traffic you can hear”) but she’s not getting it. She’s not hearing him. Maybe she’s too far gone to remember that feeling of spinning your wheels in the face of corporate reality. She’s not worrying about the life that’s ahead of her now, anyway, but the one that’s in her rear-view mirror, which she gives away with the last lines of her plea “don't jump little boy, don't jump off that roof / You've got your whole life ahead of you, you're still in your youth / I'd give anything to have skin like you”.

The song wraps up with a crescendo of electric piano and drums, and before you have time to breathe and take in what’s just happened, there is a shock of feedback from Barnett’s guitar and we crash straight into the next song. Pedestrian at Best, which is anything but, comes in even hotter than Elevator Operator did at the top of the album.

I adore that moment where one song explodes into the next one here. It feels like you’ve slammed on the brakes and taken an unexpected turn-off towards a whole new destination.

Once again Barnett comes in with a spit-fire of lyrics, like the words are overflowing from her and impossible to contain. If Elevator Operator was about a youthful detachment in general told through the lens of character Oliver Paul, then Pedestrian at Best is a song about a youthful detachment in general told through the lens of the artist Courtney Barnett.

She has a great mid-60s Dylan cynicism and sneer here, laced with her own trademark Australian drawl. She is biting, she is belligerent; she is crushed under the weight of modern life and of the people in it, yet she is still way, way above it all.

I love you, I hate you, I'm on the fence, it all depends
Whether I'm up or down, I'm on the mend, transcending all reality
I like you, despise you, admire you
What are we gonna do when everything all falls through?
I must confess, I've made a mess of what should be a small success
But I digress, at least I've tried my very best, I guess
This, that, the other, why even bother?
It won't be with me on my deathbed, but I'll still be in your head

This is an exceptionally sludgy, muddy, grunge of mess and punk. Her guitar is in overdrive all throughout and pounding along as she spits out the machine gun spray of lyrics. All the internal rhymes add to the overwhelming sense of urgency and frenetic energy in the song.

Put me on a pedestal and I'll only disappoint you
Tell me I'm exceptional, I promise to exploit you
Give me all your money, and I'll make some origami, honey
I think you're a joke, but I don't find you very funny

For the most of the rest of the album, Barnett doesn’t reach this level of chaos again, though there are snatches when she really lets loose on her Fender Jaguar and proves that she is not only one of our great contemporary rock lyricists, but also one of the very best contemporary rock guitarists.

Aqua Profunda! and Dead Fox are both upbeat numbers, but more ironic than cynical, as the first two songs are. There is another great one-two punch further into the record as Nobody Really Cares if You Don’t Go to the Party and Debbie Downer blend into one another at the end of one track and the start of the other. Both prove that you can despair and still have fun at the same time. Making the best of a bad situation, Barnett shows off her melodic side on each with their huge sing-a-long chorus’ and anthemic energy.

To balance out all these uptempo, energetic songs that are lyrically dense and bursting with great guitar parts are a number of slower, lower energy songs which are lyrically dense and bursting at the seams with great guitar parts, as well.

An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in New York) is about as conventional as Barnett gets here, whilst Kim’s Caravan is a real dirge. As epic in scope as Barnett has ever gotten, the themes here are not just about personal or internal anxieties but much larger existential threats. Climate change. Capitalism. Jesus, and he’s none too happy with us for what we’ve done to his Father’s earth.

Kim’s Caravan might be the heaviest track on the record in terms of it’s subject matter, but Barnett touches on heavy subjects throughout. Depreston is another with a big subject, and yet may be the most beautiful sounding song anywhere on the album (alongside closer Boxing Day Blues).

Built around a simple guitar part which repeats at the end of each couplet, shuffling brushed drums and occasional swells of slide guitar, Depreston might seem like a simple story about a couple trying to find their first home together but it actually contains the history and future of a whole neighbourhood in a few simple lines.

It might just be the anthem of gentrification. The couple no longer need to live in the trendiest parts of town (they’ve got their own coffee percolator now, after all) so it might be time to move out to suburbia. Naturally there they find a house that’s too big for them (“It’s got a lovely garden, a garage for two cars to park in / or a lot of room for storage if you’ve just got one”) and, luckily for them, it’s going pretty cheap. It’s a diseased estate, after all. Who’d live all the way out here?

Well, likely no-one, anymore. The handrail in the shower, old-fashioned kitchen-wear and photo on the side of a young man in a van in Vietnam all point towards the fate of the previous owners, and the reason that the house is up for sale in the first place.

All this is too depressing to think of. There’s too much history in the walls, and not enough life in the neighbourhood. If you’ve got a spare half-a-million, you could knock it down and just start re-building.

One song on the album where Barnett balances the cynicism and sneering of the first two tracks with the slower tempo of these others is Small Poppies. A lurching, leering and creeping slow burn that unnerves and unsettles.

I have seen Courtney Barnett live plenty of times, and this song is always a highlight. At first it drags its feet and ambles along into existence but by the final shouted / screamed line (“An eye for an eye for an eye for an eye for an eye, I dreamed I stabbed you with a coat hanger wire!”) and the final extended, shredded guitar solo, Barnett ends up either down on bended knees or else laying flat out on her back; giving everything she can, playing every note she knows, to overwhelm and engulf her adoring audience.

I don't know quite who I am, oh, but man, I am trying
I'll make mistakes until I get it right
An eye for an eye for an eye for an eye for an eye
I used to hate myself, but now I think I'm alright

On this album, Courtney Barnett really found herself and it was more than simply alright.

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Shadows in the Night - Bob Dylan

One thing you learn very quickly once you become a Bob Dylan fan is that he rarely does what you think he is going to do, but the left-turn he took in 2015 might have been more unexpected than anything else he’s sprung on us so far. In a career full of audacious moves, was there any more audacious than this?

Shadows in the Night is not Dylan’s first covers album, but it is his first full album of covers from outside the folk cannon. He has never been famed for having a conventionally beautiful voice, so taking on ten songs made famous by his Columbia Records label-mate Frank Sinatra doesn’t at first seem like a wise move.

But another thing you learn once you become a Bob Dylan fan is that you shouldn’t ever doubt him. He delivers these songs as if they have always been his. As if he lived them, wrote them and walked around inside them for his whole life. He set the Standard for their modern interpretation. Hundreds of other voices have sung these songs since Sinatra, but no-one else has made them sound like this. Practically nobody else has made them their own in the way that Dylan does. Plenty of better singers than Dylan have sung these songs, but none have ever sung them better.

And it’s not just the singing. The song selection is perfect for Dylan’s voice. His band is expert at transposing music meant to be played by a full orchestra into something that works for a 5 piece group of guitars, and occasionally shaded by muted brass. Donnie Herron’s steel guitar especially is a star of the show, as is Tony Garnier’s bowed cello bass. The album is masterfully produced by Al Schmidt, who himself worked not only with Sinatra but also Sammy Davis Jnr, Tony Bennett and a who’s-who of the other greats.

I would go as fast as to say this is one of Dylan’s most perfect records. I think it belongs firmly inside his top 10, and maybe even towards the top half of that figure. I couldn’t fault or want to change anything about the mood or the atmosphere; the feel of this album or the playing on it. The singing? Just listen to Dylan croon What’ll I Do or, especially, his profoundly beautiful rendition of That Lucky Old Sun if you’ve ever doubted his prowess or powers as a vocalist.

The album could be seen as a sequel, and absolutely as an equal, to Willie Nelson’s 1978 masterpiece Stardust but I see it more as a companion piece to Blood on the Tracks.

Both records are drenched in heartbreak, are drenched in regret and remorse. At times they try to pull the missing lover back whilst at others they push her away all over again. Blood on the Tracks has more rage, but, as the more mature record, Shadows in the Night’s rage has mellowed into resignation.

Blood on the Tracks feels like the album you reach for in the immediate aftermath of a breakup. Shadows in the Night is the album you play when you’ve gotten past the initial shock. You’re over the worst of it, but the moon is full and your arms are empty. The glass of Heaven’s Door whiskey which you’ve just downed is making you reminisce. In those wee small hours, this is the only album that’ll do.

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Notable album releases

Adele - 25

Alabama Shakes - Sound & Color

Blur - The Magic Whip

Destroyer - Poison Season

Father John Misty - I Love You, Honeybear

Florence & The Machine - How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful

Jamie xx - In Colour

Julia Holter - Have You in My Wilderness

Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly

Tame Impala - Currents

Bonus Album:

Wilco - Star Wars

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Next up: You Want It Darker.

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