COURTNEY BARNETT & KURT vile lotta sea lice

A relaxed but revealing collaboration. By Jason Anderson

For a genuine friendship to develop, it helps when both parties have a few things in common. It could be acquaintances they already share or aspects of their respective histories. Perhaps you have common interests, or jobs that require you to spend most of your time either holed up inside your head ‘wracked with insecurities’ or commanding the stages of mud-strewn music festivals. Maybe you both do a mean karaoke version of a Belly song.

But what may be the most essential quality of any new bond is a shared sense of humour, should you both be fortunate to have one in the first place. Being two of the craftiest, funniest and warm-hearted singer-songwriters around, Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile are a natural pairing on the grounds of that factor alone. Sure enough, the 29-year-old Australian and the 37-year-old Philadelphian spent part of the last few years turning a mutual admiration society into an intercontinental creative partnership. So maybe it’s no surprise that Lotta Sea Lice – a smattering of new songs, traded songs and other people’s songs cut in Melbourne with a few more friends, like Mick Turner and Jim White of The Dirty Three, Stella Mozgawa and Mick Harvey – is a charmingly ramshackle and occasionally sublime demonstration of the duo’s many affinities. What’s less predictable are some of the directions that these two have encouraged each other to go in, especially when it comes to Barnett’s willingness to reveal new shades as a writer and performer. of course, if Barnett and Vile had been too like-minded, they wouldn’t have any spaces between each other to explore. on the basis of the brilliantly acerbic songs that filled her 2015 debut, Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Think, Barnett comes off as the more caustic of this pair, though she’s also the more buoyant. Consider the wit at work in “Elevator operator”, a crackpot black comedy whose lead character may head up to a rooftop with worrying intentions but who insists, “I’m not suicidal, just idling insignificantly.” Then there’s the tumble and jumble of putdowns in “Pedestrian At Best”, in which Barnett portrays the worst of romantic partners: “Put me on a pedestal and I’ll only disappoint you/Tell me I’m exceptional, I promise to exploit you.”

The seemingly free-associative aspect of Barnett’s writing belies the degree of craft required to create such instantly sticky songs. The same goes for the unflappable-slacker demeanour of a man

who gets more laidback with each LP since 2008’s Constant Hitmaker, an endearing introduction to Vile’s scrappy brand of folk, country-rock, psych pop and CrazyHorse-on-Quaaludes wind-outs. Yet just as Barnett’s scatterbrained humour is a bit of a ruse, Vile uses his outward amiability to explore feelings and ideas that may be darker than you can easily detect.

Very much minted as a loose project by two musicians who didn’t even think they were making an album (a long-ish EP was the height of their ambitions),

Lotta Sea Lice has the same casual air that Vile strives to maintain. But for all of the album’s shaggy, just-pals-hanging vibe – at its loosest, it’s an indie-rock Jamming

With Edward! – there’s a more thoughtful aspect to Lotta Sea Lice that gives the album a surprising depth.

Vile clearly opened up those possibilities when he sent Barnett “Over Everything”, an easygoing indie-rock track that was the first song he wrote with her in mind and now opens the album. With the singers trading verses in what sounds like a shared internal monologue that’s accidentally been spoken aloud, the lyrics hopscotch between topics ranging from the difficulties caused by the pair’s timezone differences to the hearing problems Vile has apparently incurred thanks to his youthful reluctance to “neuter my

jams with earplugs”. But the song also establishes key concerns in the music the duo developed together, which are the challenges of creating and performing and the magic that happens when the intensely private activity of making art becomes a means of connecting with someone else. That’s the idea that Barnett emphasises in the verse that follows Vile’s pledge to wear earplugs from now on. “When I’m strugglin’ with my songs, I do the same thing too,” she sings. “And then I crunch ’em up in headphones ’cos why wouldn’t you?/You could say I hear you on several levels at high decibels.” Vile ends this exchange by expressing his hope to get past his hang-ups and get lost in music: “I wanna dig into my guitar/Bend a blues riff that hangs over everything.” Barnett and Vile’s penchant for selfreflexivity brings out more troubling

notes, too. Making like a new-school Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood – though comparisons to country-music partnerships like George Jones and Tammy Wynette are equally apt – they continue to trade lines in “Let It Go”, a plaintive, Barnett-penned song that cheekily comments on its own construction process (“Eastern standard, open G/Trans-Pacific

malady”) before suggesting the more treadmill-like aspects of the musician’s life. “Keep on rolling on the impulse,” Barnett sings in what could be a mid-show pep talk. Vile responds with the instruction to “ignore backstage lethargy”. The image of performers going listlessly through their paces recurs amid the rumbling guitars in Barnett’s “On Script”. Some listeners may hear all this as evidence of Barnett’s feelings of burnout after her career’s frenetic first years, and maybe her inevitable anxieties over her work on her second solo LP (expected next year). Then again, Vile can be hard on himself, too. For all the gratitude Vile expresses for his new friend in “Continental Breakfast”, he darkens the mood of this folky ditty when he claims to “walk like a bruised ego along shorefront property unowned to me”. Such heavier matters may be why Lotta Sea Lice’s musical orientation leans more toward mid-tempo Vile jams than Barnett’s more typically exuberant output. But there’s nothing mellow about their performances of two older songs from their back catalogues. Vile transforms Barnett’s “Out Of The Woodwork” (now “Outta The Woodwork”) from a regal country-pop ballad into a brooding Southern-rock slow-burn with help from Harvey on bass. She in turn intensifies the yearning and vulnerability in Vile’s “Peepin’ Tomboy” with a deeply felt solo performance like nothing else she’s recorded. Together, they double-down on Vile’s predilections for Zuma-era Neil Young on “Fear Is Like A Forest”, a stormy rocker by Barnett’s partner Jen Cloher.

An unabashedly goofy Vile song that dates back to high school and that he’s reworked for this occasion, “Blue Cheese” may only rate as fun filler, but at least it comes with shout-outs to the Lone Ranger and American comedian Tom Scharpling. More substantial and satisfying is the pair’s gentle closing duet on “Untogether”, a song that Tanya Donelly wrote for Star, Belly’s 1993 high-water mark. Vile and Barnett save their sweetest harmonising for Donelly’s surrealistic take on another theme at the LP’s core, the potential perils and absolute necessity of trying to close the gaps that exist between yourself and other people. Thankfully, that’s just what these two are able to do on an album that splendidly makes the most of a unique creative kinship, as well as a shared desire to cast light in dark places.