Seriously, is there anything this woman can't do?
Barnett's first album, Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit (Milk, 2015), betrays, first and foremost, a Velvet Underground fixation. Pedestrian at Best sounds like a cross between the Velvet Underground's Sister Ray and Lou Reed's Dirty Blvd. That Sister Ray rhythm is slown down to an almost reggae beat in An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in New York). Lou Reed-ian overtones via Jonathan Richman's Modern Lovers permeate also Dead Fox. But it's the entire vocabulary of the first decade of rock music to be appropriated by Barnett's garage band. Elevator Operator is like Sheryl Crow covering the Rolling Stones Nobody Really Cares If You Don't Go to the Party is an echo half a century later of countless stomping garage rave-ups. The anthemic riff, the soaring refrain and the tinkling organ of Debbie Downer evoke psychedelic ditties of the 1960s. The bluesy seven-minute Small Poppies has a guitar solo worthy of the heroes of the 1960s, as is the psychedelic guitar solo at the end of Kim's Caravan.
7/10
7/10