Watch Everything Go Beautifully to Hell in Courtney Barnett's New Video

By Jia Tolentino | April 15, 2015 | 2:35pm

Entertainment

Here’s the new video for “Kim’s Caravan,” a great song off Courtney Barnett’s impressively coherent-in-its-looseness debut full-length Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. According to Pitchfork, the song’s being released as a Record Store Day one-off 12″ (with a John Cale cover as its B-side), and like much of Barnett’s work, “Kim’s Caravan” builds with a sense of the accidental—an encroaching haphazardness that’s well fit to the song’s rather literal subject of ecological degradation:

I see a dead seal on the beach/ The old man says he’s already saved it three times this week/ Guess it just wants to die/ I would wanna die too/ With people putting oil into my air/ But to be fair, I’ve done my share

Barnett drawls, Lou Reed-y, as the storm gathers in the video and in the track. By the end, the momentum is heavy, the glass is flying everywhere, the flood’s coming in.