Courtney Barnett: "Depreston"
If you’ve seen Courtney Barnett and her band in the past year, you know this one. It’s a more vulnerable headspace for the wry lyricism that has become Barnett’s trademark; her most direct contemporaries might be bands like Parquet Courts and Speedy Ortiz, their clever poetry itself recalling Pavement, but rarely have any of those groups been so cutting. “Depreston” is Barnett’s somber tale of house-hunting in the suburbs of Melbourne, a depressing neighborhood with few cafés and visible crime, heavy with an emptiness you can feel in this spacious, mid-tempo music. The song is rooted in the dilemma of all artists—that of finding a cheap place to live on the outskirts, of embracing domestic self-reliance and adult responsibility and just brewing your own coffee—but it winds its way into a poignant ballad of memory, death and growing.
It’s telling that Barnett has a background in photography; her songs capture fleeting, quotidian details that are full of truth. It is a photograph that sets the existential tone of “Depreston”, as Barnett pokes around this cheap old house with a realtor, and learns that its last resident had died: “Then I see the handrail in the shower,” Barnett sings, wistfully and a bit detached, “A collection of these canisters for coffee, tea and flour/ And a photo of a young man in a van in Vietnam.” Her mind races, and as Barnett negotiates her own impending relationship to adulthood, she reminds us of what comes after it with empathy and care. Anyone who’s sorted through a grandparent’s dusty belongings before the apartment is sold off knows the feeling—that of opening an old book to find a startling relic that wakes you up, artifacts that loom with meaning, the ephemera of daily life that echoes on and on.
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