Courtney Barnett: "Pedestrian at Best"
“Put me on a pedestal, and I’ll only disappoint you,” Courtney Barnett confides a minute or so into “Pedestrian at Best”, the lead single from her forthcoming LP Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. From its very first line, “Pedestrian”—one part kiss-off, two parts “existential time crisis”—is riddled with contradictions: “I love you, I hate you, I’m on the fence, it all depends.” “Pedestrian” is a mental lightning storm, a live-and-direct dispatch from the center of Barnett’s considerable brain. The self-described “internal diatribe” is swarming with stray thoughts: Barnett spouts “bittersweet philosophy,” questions her ability not to screw up her newfound fame, and delivers what’ll likely stand as 2015′s sickest on-record burn: “I think you’re a joke, but I don’t find you very funny.”
Though Barnett threatens to flood her skull with turpentine and cyanide, that’s just the anxiety talking; as any nervous person’ll tell you, it’s often easier to catalog your neuroses all at once than have to confront them one-by-one. And, for a song so fully lodged inside Barnett’s head, the blistering “Pedestrian” certainly sounds extroverted; Barnett delivers these self-examinations atop a barrage of power-chords, splitting the difference between “Serve the Servants” and “You Really Got Me”. For all its self-lacerations, the darkly funny, deeply revealing “Pedestrian” is a real hoot, one of the finest rock songs of the young year. “I must confess, I’ve made a mess of what should be a small success,” Barnett shouts at the top of the chorus. Hasn’t happened yet.
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