Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile - Lotta Sea Lice
The Guardian 80
(Matador)
Although the pairing of these two wonderfully languid singer-songwriters could have ended up too hazy, their mutually dreamy, drawling styles complement each other perfectly. The way their guitars jangle and chime together reflects a longstanding friendship. They sing on each other’s old songs: Barnett’s Outta the Woodwork or a joyously upbeat version of Vile’s Blue Cheese. They turn in a harmony-soaked take on Belly’s Untogether and Barnett leads a Crazy Horse-style blast through her wife Jen Cloher’s Fear Is Like a Forest.
Five new original songs showcase a similar kooky charm as they rattle through random subjects. Vile sings about decibel-induced hearing impairment in six-minute opening duet Over Everything, while the pair drawlingly celebrate their long-distance bond in Continental Breakfast (“I cherish my intercontinental friendships”). Laughter in the studio punctuates songs that sound as much of a delight to record as they do to listen to: Lotta Sea Lice is at least the sum of its two talented parts.
Continue reading... Thu Oct 12 21:30:14 GMT 2017Drowned In Sound 80
When this reviewer interviewed Courtney Barnett at the absolute peak of her debut full-length’s success, in late 2015, she did not come across by any stretch of the imagination as a woman in a rush. Plenty of her contemporaries would have been anxious to strike while the iron was hot with a follow-up if they’d enjoyed the kind of halcyon year that the Australian did with Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, but instead, Barnett seemed happy to tend to her still-fledgling record label back in Melbourne, Milk, and se where the wind took her in terms of songwriting inspiration. As she said more than once in a nondescript dressing room at The Ritz in Manchester, where she’d been idling the pre-show afternoon away with a book and working her way through her rider’s Stella allowance, 'I’m an artist, man, not a machine'.
Kurt Vile, then, seems like an ideal creative bedfellow, given that he has never worn the demeanour of a man unduly troubled by the passage of time. In fact, the languid, carefree pace of his records tends to belie their compositional complexity, in the same way that Barnett’s unhurried drawl is a far cry from the boisterousness that she and her band bring to the stage. Vile, too, put out his last full-length, b’lieve i’m goin down, in 2015, and has also been happy to dip into other projects since, popping up on The Sadies’ Northern Passages earlier this year. He and Barnett have been friends for a long time, ever since they toured together when Barnett was just starting out on the international stage, and she gushed to him about her love for his career highlight to date, 2011’s Smoke Ring for My Halo.
Lotta Sea Lice apparently takes its name from an in-joke, one that has its origins in a story told by Warpaint drummer and Barnett’s compatriot Stella Mozgawa, who drums on the record and has toured with Vile; she’ll hit the road in support of this album, too, alongside an indie all-star cast that also, intriguingly, includes Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss - two drummers? That’s not something that Lotta Sea Lice’s arrangements seem to call for, so time will tell. Despite the fact that the songs were cut on Barnett’s home turf, it’s actually Vile’s instrumental influence that hangs heaviest over them.
As clean and sharp as the production values are here, this is a record that sounds every inch as if it was conceived and constructed in a garage, with the sessions likely starting out with no ultimate goal in mind other than to jam and see what happened. You’d expect a certain melding of the two individuals’ skill sets here and largely, they blend nicely; the folky tone of the electric guitar is rooted in Vile’s work, but Barnett is a virtuoso player herself and on the woozy likes of midpoint standout ‘Outta the Woodwork’, it’s hard to tell who’s playing what - it’s his sound and her sensibility.
On the lyrical front, meanwhile, the pair seem to have rubbed off on each other, and they frequently sing each other’s lines; Vile’s description of how “these days I plug ‘em up”, in reference to his tinnitus-ridden ears, sounds like the sort of casually charming observation you imagine Barnett scrawls on the back of napkins on the road. Vile himself, meanwhile, finds room for plenty of silliness on the irresistibly daft ‘Blue Cheese’. They seldom step on each other’s toes, and for the most part - the occasional clanger aside - their words sit handsomely side by side. Keith Richards always talks about what he calls 'the ancient art of guitar-weaving', the way he and Mick Taylor, and then Ron Wood, would complement each other in their playing. The written-word equivalent of that simpatico functionality is manifest on Lotta Sea Lice.
The atmosphere was also apparently relaxed enough for the duo to tackle a couple of covers, which accompany the album’s seven original tracks. ‘Fear Is Like a Forest’ is a take on a 2009 track by Barnett’s wife, Jen Cloher, who herself released one of the year’s finest full-lengths back in August with a self-titled effort that Barnett played guitar on. It’s at once a bluesier affair than the original and a more expansive one, too, with Vile chipping in with a noodling guitar solo. More telling when it comes to their shared influences is their version of an old Belly song, ‘Untogether’; in closing the record, the original’s blissed-out balladry, flecked as it was with the melancholy of Mazzy Star, becomes a thoroughly lovely back-and-forth that’s countrified by the tasteful inclusion of slide guitar.
Lotta Sea Lice is indeed, as its creators would be at pains to point out, the sound of two good mates having a bloody good time for no other reason than that they could, and that they wanted to. Barnett and Vile are both laid-back enough characters that you can take them at their word when they say that they weren’t really looking for anything more than that out of the project; so often, that kind of ‘it-was-just-supposed-to-be-for-fun’ angle can come off a touch defensive, as if the artists involved know that the audience is looking for more. No danger on that front; Lotta Sea Lice won’t totally slake the thirst of the pair’s individual fanbases for new solo work, but what it does do is see them bring out the best in each other. It’s a powerful testament to the possibilities offered up by a genuine creative friendship.
Fri Oct 13 20:01:54 GMT 2017Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile
Lotta Sea Lice
[Matador; 2017]
Rating: 4/5
Collaboration is a vital element of rap music. Whether to further affirm the friendship between a pair of MCs or to simply reap the benefits of two lucrative rappers’ combined star power, hip-hop frequently revels in the camaraderie of a shared bill. But in rock & roll, artist alliances are far more precarious: so fine and capricious is the line between genuine artistic symbiosis and insipid, money-hungry tripe. The hit-to-miss ratio is, on the other hand, a bit more stable and even, though the collaborative failures are often more conspicuous and lurid than the successes. For every Scott Walker/Sunn O))) pairing, there’s Santana ft. Rob Thomas. For every St. Vincent/David Byrne portmanteau, we get a Lulu. On Lotta Sea Lice, however, the not-so-unlikely duo of Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett transcend the superficiality and contrivance of an indie-rock tag team, as they lend each other their stylistic strengths while simultaneously showcasing their individual musical faculties.
A born-and-bred banjo plucker, Kurt Vile’s finger-picking guitar mastery drives the tracks “Continental Breakfast” and “Peepin’ Tom” while also rising and subsiding to fit his and Barnett’s voices. Swelling during Barnett’s vocal interstices only to diminish at the verses, Vile, on “Tom,” borrows from her affinity for subtle dynamics in an act of reciprocal imitation that abounds on Sea Lice. By the album’s closer “Untogether,” Kurt has adopted his Aussie counterpart’s understated clawhammer strumming style. Barnett, likewise, tempers her verbose internal-rhyming lyricism to match Kurt’s comparatively economical linguistics. On “Let It Go,” Barnett elongates each syllable in her meter, unused to fitting so few words into a single line. And covering her partner Jen Cloher’s “Fear Is Like a Forest,” Barnett is again charged with the task of reining in her loquacious proclivities. It’s perhaps a concession in some respects, but Barnett, like Vile, explores these uncharted artistic territories with alacrity and aplomb on Lotta Sea Lice.
Often with duets, each vocalist sounds poised and on their mark, waiting avariciously to jump at their allotted verse and bask in their share of the spotlight. But on Sea Lice, Kurt and Courtney are endearingly shiftless and self-effacing, singing as if they have to be coerced like sedated show animals to hit their vocal cues. As the two swap lines on “Let It Go,” neither is vying for our attention, opting instead to attack each couplet by feel rather than calculation. Moreover, the duo’s languor emanates from a place of mutual respect and insouciance. But that’s not to say that the pair treat the collaborative nature of the album as infra dignitatem; their trademark laxness engenders an easygoing air of comfort in their rapport and instills a sense of calm as Barnett and Vile traverse themes of ennui, undesirably casual relationships, and, as they themselves put it, “intercontinental friendships.”
Droves of indie singers have strived to appear aggressively lethargic ever since Pavement weaponized slackerdom in the mid-90s, but few are as convincing in their sangfroid as Kurt Vile or Courtney Barnett. Whether performing as solo artists or collaborating, Barnett and Vile relish the looseness of rock & roll, never taking themselves too seriously, yet often crafting enthralling songs all the same. And while the album isn’t exactly synergistic in its coupling of the two singers — neither Kurt nor Courtney achieve their lyrical or musical apex here — Lotta Sea Lice nevertheless intimates an unrelenting kinship between its two auteurs. As Courtney explains on “Over Everything,” “You could say I hear you on several levels at high decibels/ Over everything.”