#2687 Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile - Lotta Sea Lice

When you look at Barnett and Vile, its obvious that they should work together and obvious that it probably wasn't going to quite... work. At least not at first.

Barnett's an incredible singer and lyricist who brings enough guitar punch to save her from singer-songwriter doldrums. But she needs that intimacy and presence, she's not one to carry a song with her guitar work (Depreston excepted).

Vile's a meandering mumblepuss, and again, a just-ok guitar player, chopswise. But he gets by on feel, just about the best out there when it comes to weaving atmosphere and stretching space and time with some magical sense of patience and tone.

Which is to say, here's two artists who aren't wizards musically, but who have their own magical thing going that makes them special, and the kind of thing that requires a real commitment to vision. Can that commitment survive collaboration?


Nah. Mostly not. The unsurprisingly front-sequenced Over Everything is the one exception - god its gorgeous, that stretched-out Vile pacing, Barnett meandering over top, and their own special guitar tones dancing over top.

But mostly it's just a bit Travelling Wilburys -- blunted, Courtney's sense of personal relation undercut by Kurt's involvement, with no sense that the songs can bear to wait for his sense of timing to unfold.

It's telling that the two other songs that work are On Script, where Barnett gets full vocal duties, and the guitars surge and pile and sweep away, and the seemingly Barnett-solo Peepin' Tom. The songs where the two sing together just don't land, sapping that sense of the actual.

Yet.

I can see it. These are two pointy objects that don't mesh together naturally. But I can see it working, and I hope they stick with it. This feels slapdash. They both need to bow to eachothers' quirks -- let Courtney sing, let the songs run long, and the whole thing could be a sprawling gorgeous mess. I'd die for an album with 4 ten-minute songs, where her words push and give way to spiraling guitar interplay into forever -- that'd be an album that played to their strengths. This is not that album, yet 3.5/5