The acclaimed Australian musician is back in top form with her second full-length studio album, ‘Tell Me How You Really Feel’

Despite being one of the greatest lyricists alive, Courtney Barnett has never been one to embrace the praise. In “Pedestrian At Best” from her breakthrough 2015 album Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, Barnett promises to exploit anyone who puts her on a pedestal or calls her exceptional. But what she didn’t share is that criticism still hurts, and she’ll exploit you for disregarding her work, too.

After reading a comment on one of her songs that said “I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and spit out better words than you,” she takes the battle to the anonymous commenter in “Nameless, Faceless.” Over bouncy triplets she sings, “Don’t you have anything better to do? / I wish someone could hug you / Must Be Lonely / Being angry, feeling overlooked” before nonchalantly taunting that her words still reign supreme.

After all, she’s Courtney Barnett; he’s still a faceless commenter.

Much of her new album, Tell Me How You Really Feel, deals with anger, confusion and uncertainty. If Sometimes I Sit found Barnett thriving by turning the mundane into the magnificent, Tell Me How finds Barnett making the terrible into the tolerable and dealing with the draining aspects of life as a touring musician.

Coming off the underwhelming Whole Lotta Sea Lice collaboration with Kurt Vile, Barnett has rediscovered her ability to make personable songs that jump out at the listener. Sea Lice was mostly about Barnett and Vile’s friendship and songwriting process, but it felt like they knocked the tracks out in a few uninspired hours. Tell Me How You Really Feel is a return to form. The songs are less meta incantations about fighting through writer’s block and more the result of persevering through it to achieve a lasting work.

After touring the world with an acclaimed record, she’s no longer singing about organic vegetables and insomniac palmistry, but despite the change in subject matter, she has not lost her identity as a songwriter. She’s just evolving. Her ability to ponder the tiny things in life has morphed into a greater concern for society as a whole, as “Kim’s Caravan” suggested she would eventually do. 

The record’s clearest emotion is fear, both hers and ours. “You don’t have to pretend you’re not scared / Everyone else is just as terrified as you / Medication just makes you more upset,” she says in “Charity,” opting for a human connection over chemical correction. The most frustrated effort on the album is “I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch,” a punky stomp powered by pent-up anger. The bass line roars with attitude, the guitar flips between harsh power chords, atonal squeals and descending wiry cries. She may claim to not always know what to say, but when she pairs her thoughts with music, the results are exercises in precise expression.

But the whole notion of expressing true emotions is flipped in the hopeful album closer, “Sunday Roast”: “I’ve got a lot on my mind, but I don’t know how to say it,” she admits. In contrast to song titles that presumably say exactly what she’s feeling — “Crippling Self-Doubt And A General Lack Of Confidence,” “Hopefulessness,” “Need A Little Time” — sometimes even those who are touted for their wordplay struggle to say anything they feel is adequate or decisive. On “Crippling Self-Doubt” she says, “I never feel as stupid as when I’m around you / And indecision rots like a bag of last week’s meat / And I guess it’s hard to keep everybody happy.” But regardless of how Barnett thinks others may be receiving her ideas, her signature wordplay still shines, complemented by the instrumentation.

Barnett earned her reputation as a lyricist, but her guitar playing has always been exemplary. She’s rarely flashy, opting to let the the chords do the heavy lifting. Tell Me How’s intro features her downtuning her guitar to a darker drop-D tuning. It develops into a beautiful, somber chord. The downtune echoes the lyrical driving force of the album — “Take your broken heart / Turn it into art” — by removing us from Barnett’s range of familiarity and moving into a more emotionally charged realm. As the feedback crescendos at the climax of “Hopefulessness,” she avoids the natural tendency to resolve the song on a major chord, and the sound instead fades into a boiling tea kettle being taken off of the stove. The music and lyrics meld together like never before — they’re simple but, in tandem, help Barnett utilize the mundane in song rather than singing about it.

When the Deal sisters (Kim and Kelley, of The Breeders) sing “Tell me how you really feel” in “Crippling Self-Doubt,” Barnett responds with the anthemic chorus of “I don’t know I don’t know anything / I don’t owe I don’t owe anything.” When it is finally her time to share, she has nothing to say. She already put it into her music. 

Courtney Barnett never asked to be the voice of a generation. In fact, with this new album, she’s vying to be the opposite: a listening ear. This is an album that, above all, yearns for honesty in a time when truth has been declared dead, negative media coverage is immediately decried as fake news and faith in our fellow humans seems to be sagging. Although Barnett sings “I’ll be what you want when you want oh when you want it / But I’ll never be what you need” in “City Looks Pretty,” her willingness to listen may be exactly what many people need. So go ahead and tell Barnett how you really feel — unless you’re going to put her on a pedestal. Then she might have some choice words at the ready.

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