Slowly but surely
Australian singer-songwriter measures out her life with killer tunes. By Victoria Segal.
Courtney Barnett
★★★★
Things Take Time, Take Time
THE VIDEO for Before You Gotta
Go, a sweet, self-lacerating love song from Courtney Barnett’s third album, shows the singer roaming around with a tape machine, field-recording trees, a dog, the sea, her own sprouting head. Since her 2015 debut Sometimes I Sit And
Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, Barnett has displayed a gift for picking up the buzz and whirr of everyday life. Her slow-release songs aren’t so much ripped from the headlines as rolled from bedsheets or brushed from kitchen counters, her phrasing conversational, her guitar missing a buttonhole or two.
That ability to record what’s going on inside and out has unsurprisingly been tested to its fullest extent in the last year. Things Take
Time, Take Time, written alone in Melbourne, showcases a new kind of sitting and thinking (or just sitting). Windowsills frame Rae Street, a deceptively drowsy snapshot of a suddenly shrunken world, and Here’s The Thing’s lonely panic (“Looking like I’ll never leave this room again”). The album title echoes this unrushed mood, but it also comes with a drag factor, a sense of hours being eaten up with little to show for them. Self-care bulletin Take It Day By Day offers the consolation “soon you’ll be in bed”. Days are wished away, nights trundle by. The hope for meaningful change is downgraded to a wry, “I might change my sheets today.”
Barnett knows the difference between describing stasis and sounding inert. If these songs initially seem a little underpowered compared with the vivid slacker storytelling of Avant Gardener or Elevator Operator, they soon warm up. There’s low-grade hum of frustrated desire, the constant glow of yearning for somewhere – or someone. The sleepy Here’s The Scene ends with a letter
never sent; other songs – If I Don’t Hear From You Tonight or the unashamedly sad break-up song Splendour – feel like into-thevoid voicemails or empty-chair dialogues. Connections are dropped – closing insomniacs’ lullaby Oh The Night wants a lover to “Meet me somewhere in the middle/ On our own time zone”. Making a table for somebody (as on Sunfair Sundown) is almost the best thing you can do for a person – provide something solid, something steady.
There are spikier moments – Turning Green’s anxious beats, Write A List Of Things To Look Forward To’s mordant R.E.M. – but Barnett has resisted the temptation to make a claustrophobic, tightly-bound record. Instead, there’s a sunny, open-window brightness to these songs, Stella Mozgawa’s production letting light and warmth stream in. “If something were to happen, my dear/I wouldn’t want the last words you hear to be unkind,” Barnett sings over the Smog-like glint of Before You Gotta Go. For a record about captive states
– isolation, anxiety, romantic hope – Things Take Time, Take Time knows how to move.