By the time A Sea of Split Peas was released in 2013, Courtney Barnett was a Melbourne guitarist and songwriter with a knack for making slacker storytelling sound like precision work.
She’d played in garage bands, run her own label out of a spare bedroom, and cultivated a voice that could turn a trip to the grocery store into an existential short story. Barnett arrived at a moment when indie rock was short on genuine guitar heroes and even shorter on frontpeople who could pull off self-effacement as swagger. She filled that gap by making the mundane magnetic, channeling David Berman’s observational and self-deprecating lyrical style and Pavement’s sardonic wit and laid-back delivery.
“In my brain I rearrange the letters on the page to spell your name.”
Barnett’s A Sea of Split Peas isn’t exactly an “album” in the strict sense — it’s a double-EP stitched together — but that’s part of its charm. It feels like someone pushed a thrift-store couch into your living room, tossed you a beer, and said, “I wrote these songs while figuring out how to be myself in public — want to hear them?”
Like The Breeders before her, Barnett makes casualness feel like a superpower. You can hear the kinship in the way “Avant Gardener” stretches out syllables the way Kim Deal bends notes: unhurried, just crooked enough to feel alive. Her Australianness isn’t just a passport detail — it’s in the DNA of these songs. You can hear her turn a summer day’s oppressive heat into a character, the way some Americans might write about a snowstorm. Then there’s the relaxed, conversational drawl of someone who’s spent long afternoons in a beer garden, shading her eyes from the blinding late-afternoon sun.
There’s also that sense of “we could start a band right here in the kitchen” that The Breeders perfected — lo-fi but loaded with charisma, wry instead of cute, cool without calculation. It’s a lineage that runs through Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville detachment and all the way back to Patti Smith’s street-poet command: Phair’s suburban shrug and Smith’s New York incantations somehow coexist in Barnett’s delivery from Down Under, as if she’s channeling both over a cup of strong instant coffee and a slice of toast smeared in Vegemite.
“David” is where the record’s playful nonchalance goes full rock-nerd Easter egg. The chugging, slouching, strutting guitar riff can’t help but wink at David Bowie’s “Jean Genie” boogie groove — not in a copycat way, but like you’ve just walked past the same graffiti wall he once did and added your own tag. Barnett turns it into something looser, flirting with garage rock grime without losing her Melbourne-backyard ease.
The cover of A Sea of Split Peas looks like a fever dream of domestic anxiety filtered through indie rock’s most beautifully neurotic storyteller, where Barnett’s trademark ability to find profound unease in mundane moments gets visualized as a literal wave of split peas threatening to drown some poor soul’s kitchen-table existence. The scratchy lines and deliberate imperfection mirror Barnett’s own musical approach: seemingly offhand but secretly meticulous, with every wobbly detail serving the larger emotional architecture of someone who’s perpetually caught between wanting to care less and caring way too much about everything.
This isn’t a morning-commute record or a Friday-night-pre-game record. It’s a late-afternoon, light-coming-in-sideways, you-might-nap-or-you-might-open-another-beer record. Ideally, the first warm day after a run of gray ones, when you can crack a window and smell the air changing. You’re not in a hurry to do anything except maybe flip the record over.
And you’d likely find that record playing in your friend’s pad in Kirkwood — the kind of mate who has a milk crate of vinyl by the turntable, ashtray within reach, half-finished crossword on the coffee table. They’re the person you text “hey, you around?” and end up staying for three hours without ever turning the TV on. They have a knack for making the room feel like yours, even when you’ve just walked in.
A Sea of Split Peas is that friend, in album form — not a show-off, not a wallflower, just effortlessly in the pocket, the way the best influences always are: you don’t notice them until you look back and realize they were steering you the whole time.
Barnett didn’t just debut with a sound — she debuted with a fully formed aesthetic. The record’s balance of diaristic humor, slacker guitar charm, and unforced cool created a lane she’s kept refining: songs that feel casually thrown together but reward close listening, narratives that make the everyday feel cinematic, and arrangements that nod to alt-rock’s ’90s heyday without feeling stuck there. This double-EP announced that Courtney Barnett wasn’t just an indie one-off — she was going to be the kind of artist whose discography you trace like a conversation with a friend you’ve known for years, always picking up where you left off.
Megan’s favorite song on this album is “Avant Gardener”, because well, how could it not be? Let me set the scene for you. The year is 2013, and I’m a high school girl working retail at my small, South Georgia hometown shopping mall. I had the pleasure of being employed where all the cool kids shopped – PacSun. Every month we were sent new CDs containing meticulously curated playlists from the corporate headquarters based out of California.
I was always mesmerized by the alternative indie tracks that I had never heard before gracing my ears as I mindlessly folded shirts and stacked denim. I remember vividly my first time hearing this song come on in the store and immediately had to run to the back room to check the CD player’s display. The track feels like Barnett called you up from a payphone at a dicey gas station, and is giving you a first-hand recount of her day.
She may have been complaining about that Monday’s anticipated mundanity when she woke up, but wished it would’ve stayed that way by the end of the song. Barnett shares her story of an asthma attack, which leads her on a whirlwind adventure to the back of an ambulance. Here she assures the paramedic that being an artist is no special feat compared to saving lives. It’s a wavy, semi-sarcastic tale and still, to this day, when I hear it out in the wild, I’m seventeen again and loving it all the same.
The paramedic thinks I’m clever ’cause I play guitar
I think she’s clever ’cause she stops people dying
Wendell’s favorite song on the album is “History Eraser.” It’s a jangly, sun-drenched pub crawl of a track, rolling forward on a rhythm that feels half-strut, half-stumble, like someone narrating their own walk home after last call. Lyrically, it’s pure Barnett: deadpan one-liners tumble out as if she’s not sure whether she’s talking to you, herself, or the streetlight. The guitars have the easy, good-natured sprawl of Pavement at their most tuneful, à la “Gold Soundz,” while the chorus lands with the same sly exuberance you’d find in The Replacements’ “Alex Chilton” — the sound of a band stumbling into an anthem without even meaning to. By the time it’s over, you’re not sure if you’ve heard a song about romance, drinking, or the cosmic absurdity of being young and slightly lost — but you know you want to hit repeat before the ice in your glass melts.
Courtney Barnett is available on Bandcamp, all streaming platforms, and all places where records are sold. She’s been on NPR Tiny Desk twice, once in 2014 by herself here and again in 2017 with Kurt Vile here when they were promoting their album Lotta Sea Lice — a record full of drawled duets, traded verses, and that loose-limbed charm that makes their voices mesh so naturally. She also has a killer cover of Neil’s “Lotta Love” on the 2025 tribute album Heart of Gold: The Sounds of Neil Young, Vol. 1, and you can hear that on KCRW, Santa Monica’s public radio here. You are likely to find her songs played on SiriusXM stations SiriusXMU, The Loft, and The Spectrum.
Leave a comment