Concert review/photos: Courtney Barnett @ Union Transfer
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Officially the largest crowd she'd every played for.
[ 2/20 ] Thursday night at Union Transfer was officially the largest crowd Courtney Barnett and her band had every played for (shout out to the grownups of generation XPN for selling the joint out, and for repeatedly calling for Barnett to hit them with her controversial (only if you’re a fucking idiot) cover of “Blkkk Skkkn Head” ). Barnett turned out be more of a rocker than last year’s The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas lets on, amping her guitar up and juicing her songs with more tempo in a tight 45 minute set that had no time for the languid pleasure of a song like “Anonymous Club,” but still made some room for rambling banter with the crowd: What would we call a man with multiple penises? Say like eight or so? “A cocktopus.”
Despite all the things to note musically — the traces of heartland rock swing her small three piece band create live, her Lou Reed delivery on songs like “Avant Gardener” and “History Eraser,” the loud, fast, brash, punky album that seems to be inevitably in her future (the sound of her voice cracking on the ooooooh ooooooh ooohs of “Avant Gardener” are the first notes of that move) — it’s her see-right-through-it lyricism that’s her strongest gift.
On rock star hype: “The paramedic thinks I’m clever cuz I play guitar/ I think she’s clever cuz she stops people dyin.” On what John Givings called “old hopeless emptiness”: “I don’t want no 9 to 5, telling me that I’m alive and ‘Man, you’re doing well’… I don’t know what I was thinking, I should get a job/I don’t know what I was drinking, I should get a dog/Should get married, have some babies, watch the evening news.” On applying the dilettante’s touch to human connection: “You said ‘we only live once’ so we touched a little tongue, and instantly I wanted to/ I lost my train of thought and jumped aboard the Epping as the doors were slowly closing on the world.”
She played a new song called “Depreston,” in which she damns the “California bungalow in a cul-de-sac” where dreams go to die and proves again that repetition is the granddaddy of all poetic devices. A couple of simple chords rise, the drums kick in, and a phrase takes on a life beyond language, becomes music, “If you’ve got — A — spare half a million, you could knock it down and start rebuildin/ If you’ve got — A — spare half a million, you could knock it down and start rebuildin/ If you’ve got — A — spare half a million, you could knock it down and start rebuildin/ If you’ve got — A — spare half a million, you could knock it down and start rebuildin.'”
