Courtney Barnett Faces Doubts and Doubters on ‘Tell Me How You Really Feel’

Courtney Barnett’s deadpan vocal delivery was never much of a mask. Behind her modest tone and her obvious Australian accent, there was always a lyricist who saw both pathos and absurdity in her detailed, self-deprecating narratives of everyday life, and a guitarist and bandleader who summoned wordless emotional crosscurrents.

Last year, Barnett collaborated on “Lotta Sea Lice,” an album with a similarly unvarnished songwriter, Kurt Vile. It was full of songs as dialogues, teasing out each other’s quirks and uncertainties, and in a reworking of a track by Barnett called “Outta the Woodwork,” Vile sang, “It must be tiring trying so hard/ To look like you’re not really trying at all.” Perhaps Barnett took it as an admonition.

She has sharply altered her tactics to live up to the title of her second solo studio album, “Tell Me How You Really Feel.” In her new songs, she sets aside her sly character studies and minutely observed details for direct declarations and confrontations. They’re underlined by music that expands on all of her guitar-band idioms: growing punkier, more psychedelic, dronier and noisier as the songs demand. Barnett, 30, is stubbornly grounded in hand-played, not overly processed rock that traces a throughline from 1960s folk rock and garage rock to 1970s punk to 1980s indie rock to 1990s grunge. It’s retro but still vital, a style that has lately been rekindled largely through bands led by women.

Barnett connects with some 1990s role models in an upbeat song called “Crippling Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Self-Confidence.” It has Kim and Kelley Deal of the Breeders egging her on, shouting “Tell me how you really feel!” before Barnett proclaims, “I don’t know anything/ I don’t owe, I don’t owe anything.”

Barnett’s new songs sound like conversations she’s having with herself, her intimates and, in one song (the Pretenders-tinged “Nameless, Faceless”), the anonymous internet trolls who “Sit alone at home in the darkness/ With all the pent-up rage that you harness.” As guitars surge in its chorus she wonders, not idly, if verbal abuse could become actual assault, paraphrasing Margaret Atwood: “Men are scared that women will laugh at them,” she sings. “Women are scared that men will kill them.”

“Tell Me How You Really Feel” is, in many ways, an anthology of contention: lovers’ quarrels, negotiations with associates and friends, and arguments that are as much with herself as with others. “I get most self-defensive when I know I’m wrong,” she admits in a raw-voiced, feedback-laced stomp called “I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch”; the title sounds defiant, but in the song it’s followed by an unexpected attribution, “I hear you mutter under your breath.”

Even in conflict, Barnett stays levelheaded; she can’t help seeing multiple sides of every situation. In “Need a Little Time,” she tries to sort out a tense relationship with apologies, interventions and eventually withdrawal: “I need a little time out/ From me, me, me, me and you.” Amid the fuzz-toned tunefulness of “Charity,” she tries to cope with someone’s mood swings by offering sympathy (“You don’t have to pretend you’re not scared/ Everyone else is just as terrified as you”), placation and cheerleading (“Everything’s amazing!”), even as she starts feeling “so subservient I make myself sick.” And in “Walkin’ on Eggshells,” which harks back to the Neil Young of “Harvest,” she realizes “I don’t wanna hurt your feelings/ So I say nothing.” But then she urges, “Say what you mean to say.”

All those ambivalences govern the music, too. Barnett sticks to the indie-rock basics of guitars, bass and drums, with a keyboard now and then, and it’s all the palette she needs. She plays raucous, untamed lead guitar in “Charity” and “Help Your Self”; in “City Looks Pretty,” a song about post-tour letdown, she and guitarist Dan Luscombe stack up frantic, droning strummed guitars that telegraph both nervous energy and homebound stasis.

The album ends with “Sunday Roast,” a tentative offer of reconciliation after all the friction of the previous songs: “Keep on keepin’ on, y’know you’re not alone/ And I know all your stories but I’ll listen to them again.” Reverb envelops a steady-state drumbeat and a circular guitar-picking pattern; there are ripples of tension but the outcome is soothing.

The song that opens the album, “Hopefulessness,” signals all its ambitions but insists on its sense of proportion. It revolves around an repeated, unhurried, rising and falling guitar line, and its lyrics hold a lesson: “Your vulnerability, stronger than it seems.” It’s mostly a drone with a crescendo, patiently but inexorably building — “getting louder now,” Barnett sings truthfully. Near the end a sound appears, high and scratchy and insistent, raising the tension as the guitar feeds back. At the end the sound persists, alone and, it turns out, mundane: It’s a teakettle at a boil.

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Courtney Barnett

“Tell Me How You Really Feel”