When I read that Courtney Barnett, an acclaimed Australian rock singer-songwriter, was returning to Mexico, I bought the ticket immediately. The price was the cheapest I’ve ever paid for a foreigner artist. The venue, a medium-sized theater in Mexico City with a court and elevated seats at the back, was one I’d never been to. My excitement was at its top.

On Monday March 4^th I went to work as usual, got out a little earlier and drove 5 hours from my city to the venue. I arrived 30 minutes before Courtney Barnett came out and just a few minutes after the opening band finished their set, luckily I’d seen them before (if you’re curious: the band was Mint Field, a Tijuana-based rock trio that I highly recommend). I was tired and all I wanted was to lie in my favorite couch in my grandmother’s house, my bed for that night. But I resisted, I bought a beer and browsed Instagram while I waited. The venue was far from full and every person seemed to be there just out of some kind of uninspired curiosity.

At 9 pm sharp, Courtney, bassist Bones Sloane and drummer Dave Mudie came out to the stage waving gently. Then the first chords of ‘Hopefulessness’ started and the band grabbed my attention by force. That song starts slowly, but when it reached its climax, Courtney’s guitar squealed while she played her powerful riffs pick-less. The second song in the set was one of my favorites from last year. ‘City Looks Pretty’ has a pretty addictive rhythm and the change of pace near the end grabs you by the neck thanks to the band’s near-perfect execution. In this regard, the main highlight was Mudie’s powerful and precise drumming. Most of the time he seemed relaxed, like if he was at another rehearsal, but when he blasted the cymbals or played his perfect drum-fills you clearly knew he was using his drumsticks at full power.

I was pleasantly surprised that they played four songs off of the first two EP’s Courtney released, specially ‘Avant Gardener’. Furthermore, the surprise was bigger when I heard many people singing to the song without hesitation. A portrayal of how something mundane can drastically change in a day, Courtney sang with a pinch of disinterest, which underscores how simple her messages can be at times, but she describes the everyday musing with such detail that is hard to turn your head from it.

Throughout the concert (actually, the shortest I’ve enjoyed), Courtney thanked the audience in Spanish, during some of her solos approached to the edge of the stage and, smiled surprised when people shouted her name in unison. She presented the band after the fourth song and, in an unexpected move, sang the original duet ´Let It Go’, that she released with Kurt Vile back in 2017, as the first song in the encore, by herself. She told the audience: ‘…you’re going to have to help me with the chorus…you know Kurt? He is a great guy.’

The rest of the set consisted of the best songs out of her debut, ‘Sometimes I sit and think, and sometimes I just sit’ (shout-out to ‘Kim’s Caravan’) and several songs from the album that was being promoted in this tour, ‘Tell Me How You Really Feel’. In this last album her view is a lot more focused and she gave her stance on the current state of the female liberation movement. This gave way to one of the most cathartic moments of the evening, when she sang ‘Nameless, Faceless’, the album’s first single, and its piercing chorus that goes: ‘I wanna walk through the park in the dark/women are scared that men will kill them’

This is the thing with Courtney Barnett, despite her breezy and sometimes shy attitude it’s hard to dismiss her as just another good indie songwriter. She has always positioned herself in the role of observation. She’s a storyteller giving her point of view on what she lives every day and there’s a powerful meaning behind it too. Moreover, she details honestly how she feels about it. ‘Put me on a pedestal, I’ll only disappoint you!’ she shouts in the chorus of ‘Pedestrian at Best’, which the band played at the end of the main set. Many times has been said that her great song-writing and passionate indie rock clearly work as a counter-statement to that particular lyric. Seeing her live makes me think that she’s maybe impersonating someone while singing it, that’s not her. Courtney Barnett doesn’t disappoint and she deserves the pedestal.

Setlist:
Hopefulessness
City Looks Pretty
Avant Gardener
Small Talk
Need A Little Time
Nameless, Faceless
Small Poppies
Depreston
Are You Looking After Yourself?
Sunday Roast
Lance Jr.
Charity
Pedestrian At Best

Encore:

Let It Go
Kim´s Caravan
History Eraser