Back in 2015, when Courtney Barnett released her superb – and superbly titled – debut album Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, many music fans assumed she would very quickly become one of indie’s most prominent and defining figures. Her scruffy slacker rock, threaded through with a direct, country-tinged deadpan humour, was simply immensely likeable. Yet for whatever reason, Barnett never again managed to excite in quite the same way and slipped somewhat into the background.
Her new album Creature of Habit is now the best music she has released since that debut – and once again smartly titled. For it seems as though the 38-year-old Australian is describing herself here in an ironic sense: on the one hand because critics often accuse her of always doing the same thing, which is only partly true; on the other because her songwriting often has something repetitive about it and is not infrequently built from only a few recurring chord sequences – something that works well here. Self-awareness is the key term.
The opener »Stay In Your Lane« also feels like a comment on her own persona, as though Barnett were pre-empting other people’s criticism – and consciously not giving a damn. The fact that she of all songs unveils a heavy drumbeat here, the likes of which one has never heard from her before, speaks volumes. Elsewhere, she sings: »I like it this way.«
