Taking a break between weekends at Coachella, Courtney Barnett brought her capricious and vital Aussie rock to Portland.
Barnett is a great equalizer. It’s no short list of people who are drawn to her music and bounce on the trampoline-like floors of Portland’s Crystal Ballroom. This included middle-aged dads wearing Sleater-Kinney tour t-shirts, broody teens in Black Sabbath tees, or other teens who ceaselessly Snapchatted selfies during the show, kids under 10 wailing into floor fans, and their parents who had wiser judgment than to hire a babysitter.
Following an opening act from Canada’s Alvvays, the excruciatingly long thirty-minute interim between acts was soundtracked with songs like “Little Wing” from the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Nirvana’s “School.” It’s not a distant comparison: with her declarative debut album, last year’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, Barnett has undoubtedly secured her place alongside classic three-piece rock outfits.

Barnett is a notable perfectionist when it comes to her records. Apart from drawing the album’s cover art, she deliberately kept all the songs she wrote to herself and didn’t share them with the band until a week before recording, in order to keep the sound “fresh.” It’d make sense that a similar degree of deliberation goes into her live sets as well.
Barnett strolled onto stage, following her bandmates: bassist Bones Sloane and drummer Dave Mudie. Courtney, clad almost entirely in black, wore skinny jeans, loafers, a trucker hat that hugged her bedraggled black hair and a “Bernie Sanders is Magical” t-shirt that had the Vermont senator riding a pink unicorn.
The hat tumbled off almost instantly when she tipped her head back during the night’s opener, “Dead Fox.” Several tracks began beautifully with a looping bass line from Bones and a rhythm matched by Mudie. A fiery performance of “Small Poppies” had Barnett hollering inconsolably: “I used to hate myself, but now I think I’m alright!” which was matched by some furious strobe light flashing.
The foot-dragging opening to “Depreston” was returned with ecstatic feedback, which was almost perplexing. The way the crowd was collectively louder than Barnett during the chorus “If you’ve got a / Spare half a million / You can knock it down / And start rebuilding” one would have to think that it was at the top of the Billboard charts, or a deep cut from Barnett’s storied career. But the song came out last March. And Barnett has only been recording since 2013.
“Three Packs a Day,” Barnett’s ode to her dangerous, costly cravings for instant noodles, followed this. “Boil it up, water in a saucepan / In a cup, drink it from a silver spoon,” she drools.
Then it was a venomous delivery of “Pedestrian at Best,” which had Barnett regularly falling to her knees, possessed by her guitar; this spurred some merited moshing as the volume blasted to deafening levels. Later, during “Elevator Operator” Barnett took advantage of the extended bass-and-drum pounding rhythm arranged by Dave and Bones and teased the Beatles’ “Get Back” before jumping into the track, about an attempt at getting fresh air interpreted as a suicide attempt.
The set closed with “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party.” It’s an inexplicable site to be within a moshing swarm of fans, all of whom are screaming Barnett’s sulking line back at her: “I want to go out, but I want to stay home!”
During the final song of the night, “Avant Gardener,” footage of ants scurrying around maple syrup spirals played on the screen behind Barnett and company. The immaculate song — about looking for purpose in life only to get an asthma diagnosis, squeezes in lines that decry steep hospital bills, shout out to Australian breakfast cereal and reference Pulp Fiction — was incredibly magnetic.
By this point in the night, Barnett’s voice had become a rasp that still made the comical lines all the more devastating, like: “The paramedic thinks I’m clever ‘cause I play guitar / I think she’s clever ‘cause she stops people dying.” Even the song’s closing line, “I was never good at smoking bongs,” seemed to resonate strongly on the April 20 show.
There’s something particularly cathartic in watching how Barnett – someone who’s a studied and thorough songwriter – make room for a live set that is absolutely bananas.
Setlist:

1.  Dead Fox
2.  Scotty Says
3.  Debbie Downer
4.  An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in New York)
5.  Out of the Woodwork
6.  Small Poppies
7.  Depreston
8.  Three Packs a Day
9.  Pedestrian at Best
10.  Lance Jr.
11.  Elevator Operator
12.  Kim’s Caravan
13.  Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party

(encore)

14.  Pickles In a Jar
15.  Avant Gardener

Listen to “Depreston” from Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit below.