COURTNEY BARNETT - Tell Me How You Really Feel LP (Indie, Red Vinyl)

Label: Mom & Pop

Courtney Barnett makes lackadaisical-sounding music about being uptight. More often than not, her breezy, sung-talked tunes sweat the small stuff, carrying those underlying anxieties with a strolling gait, a cock-eyed grin and a two-guitar wig-out.

In the past five years, indie rock has gained an eminently relatable idol, just when the whole genre most needed one. Thanks to her nasal delivery and forensic eye, Barnett is worthy of the Bob Dylan comparisons that have come her way. This is a songwriter made for our times: despairing of affording organic vegetables, making the best of house-hunting somewhere depressing, trying to maintain optimism in a mad world.

On Tell Me How You Really Feel, the vignettes are less visual, the detail is less granular, and the song fictions less developed. She's saying more, with less. Tell Me How You Really Feel shifts that focus to those she interacts with – the good ones, the bad ones, the loved ones. Those she knows intimately and those who are strangers.