Courtney Barnett: Tell Me How You Really Feel
Alfred Soto, Spin, 14 June 2018
TO BE COURTNEY BARNETT and learn that Liz Phair released the Girly-Sound to Guyville set is like being Bryan Ferry and opening your door to greet a tuxedoed Cary Grant singing 'Happy Birthday'. The Australian singer-songwriter depends on a similarly thin rhythm part strummed on her electric guitar, and like Phair on 1993's galvanic Exile in Guyville, Barnett's 2015 debut Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit used chord patterns into whose melodic spaces Barnett poured curt anecdotes about existential trouble and origami — can there be a more dangerous combination?
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