Idling Insignificantly

Courtney Barnett @ Bowery Ballroom 5/19/2015
Canned Tomatoes (Whole) / Elevator Operator / Lance Jr. / An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in New York) / Small Poppies / Dead Fox / Depreston / Debbie Downer / Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party / Avant Gardener / Kim’s Caravan / Cannonball / Pedestrian at Best // Being Around / Pickles from the Jar / History Eraser

Courtney Barnett “Elevator Operator”

Courtney Barnett and her band have a different energy live than on record – the arrangements are streamlined for a trio, the bass is chunky and heavy, and Barnett’s delivery is looser and more playful. I really appreciate the relative precision in the studio – the songs are too good to not be presented as well as possible – but the looser, more playful approach is closer to the spirit of the songs, and who she is as a person. She’s one of the rare musicians who actually reminds me a lot of Stephen Malkmus, and has a similar sort of effortless swagger and clever way with words, and a guitar style that’s oddly refined for someone who seems to swing her instrument around like a cool toy. She has excellent chemistry with her bass player and drummer, and they have a great way of balancing the more tossed-off bits with the sections where they really lean in and rock the fuck out of a song. The only odd thing is that they’ve got a few songs in the set that feel like excellent set-closers and finales – “Small Poppies,” “Canned Tomatoes,” “Kim’s Caravan” – and yet the song she goes out on, “History Eraser,” is a song that just kinda comes and goes. Maybe she’d rather not be so dramatic, but like, there she is, being quite dramatic in the show! But that’s a pretty minor complaint.

Buy it from Amazon.

Chastity Belt “Cool Slut”

Chastity Belt also played on this bill, and as it turns out, their music sounds a bit different live. The structure, style, and spirit is the same as what you get on record, but there’s a lot more space in the sound. The studio recordings place a lot of emphasis on Julia Shapiro’s rhythm guitar, but on stage it’s very apparent how graceful and nimble the bass and lead guitar parts are, and how well the band performs as an ensemble. They come across like a very well-rehearsed band, not in the sense that their performance feels stiff in rote, but in that they seem to really understand each other as musicians and have an obvious rapport. The style they’re developing is very interesting, especially in the contrast between Shapiro’s blunt phrasing and Lydia Lund’s lovely, ringing lead parts. That comes together well on “Cool Slut,” which is provocative and defiant, but also rather pretty and chill. It’s basically a song in which Shapiro is giving people permission to be on the same cool vibe as her band, and it seems foolish to turn her down or get in their way.

Buy it from Amazon.