If you handed someone this album and Sometimes I Sit and Think, you'd forgive them for mixing them up. Barnett's debut was inventive and restless and clever*, fully baked and cresting the way a great second album might be.
TMHYRF's the one that sounds like a wave-making debut. The songs are enjoyable, but simple, indebted to the past, obsessed with obscuring fuzz and distortion-driven slights of hand. It's Mellow Gold, Cowboys From Hell, Surfer Rosa, Subliminal Plastic Motives, Blue Album, Gish, Homework, Black Sabbath, Undertow, The Bends**, Kerplunk, Isn't Anything -- the perfectly solid prelude to the seminal sophomore -- but it came . . after . .?***
Maybe it's hanging out with Kurt Vile - Tell Me How shares his dry take on lyrics and love of slow-roasted guitar tone. Some of those drones are some Yo La Tengo caliber endless shit. Maybe it's just what Barnett wants to _do, shaking off any need to top herself, rattling out 10 perfectly good songs about thisish and thatish, wreathed in Americana and guitars.
That feedback on the opener, that wish-this-would-go-on-forver**** sweet sweet solo on City Looks Pretty. Damn near every song has some great guitar moment, some gorgeous congregation of electricity. And while we've lost a measure of perspicacity, instead we get supreme confidence from a voice that's in it for the long haul 3.5/5
* if __I__ noticed the lyrics she's gotta be doing something right
** shh
*** this is how you get famous in 2018: hit it big with the indie nerds, leverage that cache into broader appeal
**** surely she knew there was a moment worth stretching into an 8 minute song there, did she wuss out because this was her big breakout moment? or maybe its just a bit of the old leave em wanting more. do want more.
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