I am a massive fan of Courtney Barnett. She showed up on my radar NOT when her 2015 album Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, was released, but instead when she appeared on the 2016 finale of Saturday Night Live, performing “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party” and “Pedestrian at Best.” Her performing style is completely without artifice – she tears it up, but you always know she’s having as much fun as you are. Her songs are literate, funny and often moving, the best ones almost stream of consciousness, like “Dead Fox”, and “Depreston”. “Elevator Operator” is firmly planted in my long run playlist, and will never leave my iPod.
Anyway. After Sometimes I Sit And Think, I waited – like everyone else – for a followup, and was more than “partially” rewarded the following year with the album she did with Kurt Vile (yes folks, not just a clever nom de plume) Lotta Sea Lice. The two had jammed together and decided to record a collaborative album, which turned out to be greater than the sum of its parts. These kinds of pair ups can often be just the two artists dividing things up – five tracks for you, five tracks for me – but these guys melded their styles so well you’d have been forgiven for thinking that they were not bandmates of, say, twenty years or so. Every track is charming, especially Vile’s Over Everything.
Barnett returned last year with her excellent Tell Me How You Really Feel, and recently it was Vile’s turn. Bottle It In treads the same turf as Sea Lice (n.b. that’s good!), but it’s a little more electric in nature. Supporting players like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon add extra feel and texture to the songs, and Vile unspools a filthy guitar solo on “Check Baby” (containing the all-world lyric “rub my belly with a stick of hot butter”.) You’ll like this.
[A word about sound quality: it’s excellent. I got the 180g split-color vinyl pressing; Matador Records is definitely sourcing from a good pressing plant, as my copy was clean and free from surface noise.]
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