Courtney Barnett's Deadpan Poetry Comes to the Roxian
Some songwriters reach for the mountaintop metaphor. Courtney Barnett looks at the produce aisle, the panic attack, the depressing suburb with the good bones, and finds more truth there than most people wring out of a whole career. Tonight the Melbourne singer-guitarist brings that gloriously mundane genius to the Roxian Theatre in McKees Rocks, a 7 p.m. show that should feel less like a concert and more like eavesdropping on the sharpest inner monologue in indie rock.
If you need a fast primer: Barnett broke through in 2013 with the double EP "A Sea of Split Peas," whose "Avant Gardener" — a slacker anthem about having an anaphylactic near-death experience while gardening — announced a writer who could be funny and terrifying in the same breath. Her 2015 debut full-length, "Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit," turned that voice into a phenomenon, earning a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist and cementing the Barnett template: rambling, stream-of-consciousness verses delivered in a flat Australian deadpan, then detonated by a left-handed guitar that snarls louder than her singing ever does.
That tension is the whole trick. On record she sounds like she could not be bothered; live, she plays like the building is on fire. "Pedestrian at Best" — home of the immortal, self-lacerating line "Put me on a pedestal and I'll only disappoint you" — is a grunge tantrum wearing the disguise of a shrug. "Depreston," meanwhile, starts as a wry bit about house-hunting and quietly becomes one of the decade's saddest songs about mortality and money, without ever raising its voice.
The catalog that follows only deepened the case. 2018's "Tell Me How You Really Feel" traded some of the jokes for sharper teeth, and "Nameless, Faceless" flipped an internet troll's own words back at him over a riff built for stadiums. There was the loose, generous 2017 collaboration record with Kurt Vile, "Lotta Sea Lice," proof she plays as beautifully with others as she thinks out loud. And 2021's "Things Take Time, Take Time" found her warmer, quieter, still allergic to a cliché.
Which brings us to the Roxian, and why the room matters. The former movie palace turned mid-size theater is close to a perfect Barnett venue — big enough to let the guitars swing, intimate enough that her between-song mumbling actually lands. Her songs are built on detail, the flicker of a passing thought, the specific brand of dread you feel in a stranger's kitchen. Those details evaporate in a shed. In a proper theater they hit you in the sternum.
Why care, if you have somehow made it this far without a Barnett phase? Because she is one of the last true songwriters' songwriters working at this level — a guitarist good enough to headline on chops alone, a lyricist good enough that people quote her like scripture, and a performer with zero interest in the fake sincerity that clogs most arena-indie. She makes overthinking sound like a superpower, which, for a lot of us in the crowd tonight, is exactly the reassurance we came for.
Doors are early and the room is not enormous — organizers listed just a few hundred tickets, from around $62. If you have ever stood in your own kitchen narrating your anxieties in the third person, McKees Rocks has your girl tonight. Show up. Overthink responsibly.
Sources: ConcertFix — Roxian Theatre