The Singles Jukebox

Because the ibis is only the second scariest thing to lurk in Melbourne parks.

[Video][Website]
[6.11]

Claire Biddles: “Nameless, Faceless” is a witty riposte to the relentless microaggressions that make up women’s everyday lives both on the internet and IRL, framed by a Margaret Atwood quote that looms large in current conversations about violence and sexual misconduct: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them; women are afraid that men will kill them”. Barnett jumps from talking back to below-the-line commenters (“He said “I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and spit out better words than you”/But you didn’t”) to a repeated image of self-defensive keys between fingers —  deftly showing the connection between “harmless” jibes and actual violence. I’m not especially fond of Barnett’s lofi grunge-y guitar sound, and I personally find it quite exhausting to face the specific frustrations of existing as a woman in the world in my everyday music choices, so I probably won’t be listening to this again — but it’s an undeniably vital record from a smart songwriter.
[7]

Alfred Soto: She can squeeze juicy but terse hooks out of her strummed electric guitar, and her affectless sing-song gives this elongation of a Margaret Atwood aphorism a frightening pathos: she’s gritting her teeth while keeping a key between her fingers. 
[7]

Crystal Leww: Indie rock never died, but I got older and subsequently stopped caring about guitars because it felt like I was listening to the same song over and over again. Never mind that I am a fan of country music or dance music, which face similar charges of stagnation. No, indie rock was the genre that I decided the same guitars and drum patterns were over. And yet, every once in a while, there are indie rock songs that feel like their spirit are enough to keep going. And here we are.  
[6]

Hannah Jocelyn: Courtney’s sharp as ever (the “alphabet soup” line is a favorite), and where the last album would mention her status as a queer woman in the same breath as a “possum Jackson Pollock,” she uses this song to show how even/especially as a relatively famous (and again, gay) woman she’s still afraid to walk out at night because of men. It’s startling to hear her open up like that. If the actual sonics of the song matched her intensity, it would result in a much higher score. Yet the clean deadpan-Nirvana mix of the last album has been replaced by a harsher but ultimately underwhelming Dave Fridmann impression. The Klasky Csupo-esque visuals mirror this too, with so many smart moments but too busy and refusing to just let Courtney be center-stage. It makes sense that a song about paranoia should sound and look claustrophobic, but the effect is ultimately numbing. Which, I suppose is what it’s like to live with that kind of fear daily.
[6]

Ryo Miyauchi: Courtney Barnett’s fidgety, stream-of-consciousness type of writing style set her music apart from other rock writers, so I’m confused to why she now decided to smooth it out into a more standard format to write a generic psych-pop single. Maybe she’s fed up of singing the same complaints about men being insufferable, though she always sounded more inspired than this.
[5]

Alex Clifton: Way more melodic and somehow more tempered than I imagined; somehow the controlled force of the anger, the way Barnett drops in the Atwood quote so you almost miss it if it’s in the background, commands your full attention. I keep thinking of the line from “Pedestrian At Best“: “I think you’re a joke but I don’t think you’re very funny.” It’s that line expanded into a whole song, and it’s done well.
[6]

Julian Axelrod: Courtney Barnett’s greatest gift is her empathy. She’s able to pinpoint the trials and turmoil of life’s supporting characters, tracing their eccentricities to a deeper internal pain. Even in “Nameless, Faceless,” an impassioned indictment of the catcalling cretins lurking around every corner, she makes an effort to understand these miserable men. “You sit at home alone in the darkness/With all the pent-up rage that you harness/I’m real sorry about whatever happened to you,” she croons, imagining a utopia where a hug could end misogyny. But before the song veers into #NotAllMen territory, the chorus reminds us of our painful reality: Women live in constant fear of harassment and violence, sacrificing their comfort and safety to protect men’s fragile egos. It’s a brutally effective turn, identifying the cause without ignoring its insidious effect. Barnett wields her pen as a switchblade, crafting a supervillain origin story that makes its subject all the scarier.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: The sing-song, gentle way Barnett exhibits a kind of empathy — briefly — for the nameless, faceless man who stands in for all jerk bastards who intimidate women would be so much more devastating if she didn’t blunt the impact of the Atwood quote in the chorus by sandwiching its halves between between “I wanna walk alone in a park in the dark.” It almost feels like she’s put those plastic safeguards you put on sharp-cornered furniture all over her knotted anger. That first album’s a classic for how effortlessly it combined density with pithiness, and it never needed to water down its venom.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: The arch vaudeville of the instrumental and sardonic slickness dripping from Barnett’s voice are fine for what they are. But it’s a little 101, in sentiment (Margaret Atwood’s written dozens of more interesting things than the one that became a Bartleby’s soundbite) and in sound. The title alludes to Nirvana, a track with pent-up rage that’d be misplaced here, but also with oomph.
[5]