Great injustices abound in pop, just as they do in the wider world. Music fans are forever face-palming, wondering why some new no-mark sits atop the charts while another self-evidently superior artist languishes, little known and unrewarded. There must be a world, runs the logic, in which deadpan Australian sing-talker Courtney Barnett is doing better than hat-wearing guitar moper James Bay; there must be some metric by which songs about allergies and dead foxes outgun love songs filled in with watercolours by numbers.
That world, that metric and that logic are closer than might first appear. Last week, Barnett’s second album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit – shades of Arctic Monkeys’ debut title, Whatever You Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not – headed the US music industry’s Billboard Alternative chart, crowd-surfing over the heads of Bay, Hozier, Modest Mouse and Imagine Dragons.
Clearly, Hozier has already shifted half a million in the US and Imagine Dragons win Grammies, but still, the appetite for Barnett’s drawled apercus is turning out to be far greater than anyone could have guessed when she first emerged two years ago. Perhaps even more jaw-loosening is the fact that Barnett’s album cracked the top 20 of the main Billboard pop chart, not to mention our own top 20. All this despite the fact that she sounds rather like Elastica’s Justine Frischmann singing Jonathan Richman songs in the style of the Fall.
Live, Barnett and her bassist and drummer are far squallier than on their (excellent) record. Courtney Barnett is very much a band. Their preponderance of shaken hair, plaid shirts and distortion pedals draw further parallels – with the Nirvana and grunge era and less fetishised acts like the Dandy Warhols. An older song, Lance Jr, from Barnett’s 2012 EP I’ve Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris, seems to track Nirvana’s song structures pretty closely but actually takes its cues from the Dandy Warhols’ Lance. Most of tonight’s set involves gnarly codas and wigged-out middle eights, shifting the emphasis from Barnett’s exquisitely observed lyrics to her ability to induce pogoing.
If you’ve come for the meaty songwriting, that doesn’t suffer one jot. The ones about money stand out. An older track, Are You Looking After Yourself, frets about saving for a rainy day, while the newer Depreston imagines house-hunting in a downmarket area: “If you had a spare half a million/ You could knock it down and start rebuilding,” goes its unlikely, wistful, singalong chorus, nailing the plight of twentysomethings being priced out of anything, anywhere, either here in Cambridge, or down under.
Two years ago, when Barnett’s song Avant Gardener announced this slacker poet-guitar hero’s arrival, there was the possibility that she might turn out to be a one-song wonder. Second time around, though, she has at least another all-out killer tune, the equal of Avant Gardener – the raucous Pedestrian at Best, which closes the main set in a sweaty heave of adulation. “Gimme all your money/ I’ll make some origami, honey,” runs one breathless line, indicating one of Barnett’s attitudes to the folding stuff.Alternatively, “You should start some sort of trust fund/ Just in case you fail,” goes Are You Looking After Yourself. Now Barnett can, even though failure is looking less and less likely.
Another excellent fringe-sporter, Jessica Pratt is a very different guitarist, whose recent second album has likewise cemented a burgeoning myth. Close your eyes, and Pratt’s guitar and voice are timeless folk instruments – mannered, certainly, and not particularly versatile, but utterly beguiling in their singular modulations. They most obviously recall the introverted works of Nick Drake and her fellow American Karen Dalton. For this rapt gig in a full but echoey church, Pratt plays circular patterns on her plugged-in acoustic, accompanied by an electric guitarist, Cyrus Gengras.
Open your eyes, however, and Pratt is no pastoral waif but an urban creature wearing the sharp tailoring of her adopted LA. Some of her songs – not least Strange Melody, from her latest work, On Your Own Love Again – faintly recall Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, if the stentorian Slick was half asleep in a library. On Greycedes, Pratt’s reedy tone briefly descends an octave to a near-mutter: that’s another sit-up-in the-pews moment.
For an hour, though, virtually nothing happens: one song follows another, full of dulcet warbling and plucked patterns and unobtrusive atmospheres. Such is the mystery of Pratt’s delivery, only snatches of lyrics escape the reverie, but a total reverie it is.
