Courtney Barnett
Album: The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas
Label: Milk! Records/House Anxiety/Marathon Artists
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.courtneybarnett.com.au

Kurt Cobain, Polly Harvey, Dylan, Dietrich, Beck, Morrissey, Kim Gordon - the last word in wild cards and wilder worlds; weird sounds, hazy phrases. Well, maybe not for this 25-year-old Australian who has taken a short stepping stoner stance that's oddly optimistic and strangely strange. Clearly, youth has not got any easier with the passage of time and these songs summon scenarios straight off the pages of Douglas Coupland or Chuck Palahniuk, only with a Melbourne bent in which 40-degree heat knocks you off your feet.

But, put one thought in front of another and a curiously cohesive slice of slacker life unravels in these songs. The fractious scene in Lance Jnr repels as it compels you to listen, while lead single Avant Gardener is enormously involving from the outset, building a dystopian soap opera from a gardening-related allergic reaction that brings on a panic attack in stifling heat. Are You Looking After Yourself is a brilliantly conceived ramble about how rubbish the singer is - her telly's been broken for four years and she can't be arsed to fix it - and how her folks worry about how she's doing.

Courtney Barnett's songs come fully loaded with an appealingly deadpan ennui that at once critiques and celebrates the new blank generation. In them she both covets coolness and despises it, an act that might very well be the epitome of cool … in someone else's eyes. Throughout she not-quite sings and not-quite speaks her lyrics over a scratchy, loose-limbed backing, the kind of warped groove thing the Velvet Underground might have once conjured had they backed one of Dylan's mid-60s streams of consciousness - or even The Band serving one of Lou's ravaged street poems.

Courtney Barnett likes to tell things as they are (or appear to be, to her), but she doesn't go in for big emotional comments. If it were someone else's song, the observation on Out of the Woodwork that her lover is no good at listening only at telling her everything on their mind, would come wrapped in layers of what that says about their relationship. Here, it doesn't. Except it does, only you have to hear the way it's delivered and factor in the tone of the music that accompanies it.

Of course there's a danger in picking too hard at a debut album that's not even an album - that's still to come, this is six new songs bolted on to her 2012 debut EP - that it frays at the edges then collapses, but The Double EP proves to be a pretty robust beast. Can't wait to hear what happens next.

Nick Churchill
www.thegranvillechambers.co.uk