Courtney Barnett

Tell Me How You Really Feel

- Stephen Troussz

Return of the hardest-working slacker in showbiz.

“SPRAWL”, according to the country’s unofficial laureate Les Murray, is that quintessential Australian quality of cheerfully casual excess. It’s “full-gloss murals on a council house wall” and “the rococo of being your own still centre”. across a couple of Eps, her 2015 debut album and last year’s collaboration with Kurt Vile, it’s why we’ve grown to love Courtney Melba Barnett – the goofily exuberant loose magic with which she has re-enchanted grungey ’90s garage rock.

It’s there still on the comeback single “Nameless, Faceless”, where, in her zen insouciance, she even finds it in her heart to sympathise with comment-box trolls. “I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and spit out better words than you,” her detractor claims, but it’s part of her great charm that Barnett gives the impression of managing exactly that: effortlessly transmuting the quotidian details of Melbourne life – swimming, gardening, looking at a new flat – into casually profound, delirious pop art.