Courtney Barnett faced a challenge after her explosion into the mainstream a few years ago. Her winning formula of scattergun ramblings and comical anecdotes, laid like an unmade duvet over a bed of fast-paced alternative rock, seemed unlikely to sustain its captivating energy over another album.
On Tell Me How You Really Feel, her sophomore solo album, Barnett has found a way to retain the intelligence of her songwriting, while finding ways to innovate and explore new areas of her psyche. There's a noticeable lack of a clean-cut hit in the vein of Elevator Operator or Depreston from her debut Sometimes I Sit and Think, but there's many a meaty song to fall in love with, and I suspect many a listener will see themselves in Barnett's excavations of her most inner anxieties.
Anxiety is a theme that permeates much of the record in both subtle and obvious ways – most prominently, of course, with the playful Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Self-Confidence, on which Barnett recognises her tendency to put others on a pedestal: "I never feel as stupid as when I'm around you". Overall, it's a much blacker record than her debut, starting right off with Hopefulessness, which rolls out of its own murky depths and morphs into a full-noise rock snarl.
Barnett has always done darkness beautifully, but she retains some measured optimism on the record, such as on City Looks Pretty, which could reference her writer's block: "Wakin' up to another dismal day/You got a ways to go, you oughta be grateful". Nameless, Faceless, her most political song yet, puts an internet troll in his place: "He said, "I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup/And spit out better words than you/But you didn't."
