I Love The Courtneys & Didn't Get Tickets To Courtney

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BY LIZ

Have you heard the Courtneys? They're this new-ish band from Vancouver: three girls, only of whom is named Courtney. I found them a few weeks ago because someone somewhere said something about they sound how like Blake Babies covering Sonic Youth - which they don't, at all, but I'm still into it. I listened to about half of a song on their Bandcamp page and then immediately bought the whole album and it's been a really chill second-half-of-summer soundtrack so far. They sing a lot about swimming and bodies of water, and about boys and love and being broke, and the songs sort of all sound the same but in a good way that hypnotizes you a little but also gets you hyper. I love these songs the most:

i. "90210." I think this is the one that sold me on the Courtneys. It sounds like summer and like being free, a kind of free-ness that's not hippie-ish or punk or even little-kid-like. It's just dreamy and scrappy and breezy and brash, and I always feel lighter and brighter when the Courtneys all yell "Slow down! Chill out! Breathe in! Breathe out! Kick back, and have a rest! Don't forget/To take a breath!" I like being screamed at to relax. And the video's so rad: it's got a cute fat baby and a cute fat dog, plus the girls in the band playing guitar in the ocean and eating pizza on the beach. You can watch it here.

ii. "K.C. Reeves." It's about Keanu Reeves! Love him so much. The song's a little jokey and that's not really my thing - usually the jokiest I like my songs is, I don't know, "Far Away Eyes." And one of the lyrics is "You are my '90s dream," which is minorly annoying - it bugs me when decades are used as adjectives. But "K.C. Reeves" is still a blast, with cool references to lesser-celebrated Keanu works like the 1986 made-for-TV movie Babes in Toyland. Plus it's got the most exuberant name-spelling-in-song since David Bowie spelling his own name in his cover of "Cactus" by the Pixies. Keanu's middle name is Charles, by the way. Huh.

iii. "Social Anxiety." The chorus goes "NOW WE'RE ON AGAIN, NOW WE'RE OFF AGAIN! NOW WE'RE ONE AGAIN, NOW WE'RE TWO AGAIN!" - and so on and so forth, over and over. It's all very shouty, all three Courtneys shouting together. I love it when bands all shout together, like Big Star shouting every lyric together on "Don't Lie To Me" - it's so tough and kind of aggressive but also playful, like they're playing at being some wild gang. If I were 19-years-old and engaged in a stupid love thing with some hot exciting jerk, I would so leech off that wildness and play the hell out of "Social Anxiety" all day every day.

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So I learned from this fun Vice interview that the Courtneys once made t-shirts with pictures of Courtney Love, Courteney Cox, and Kourtney Kardashian, which is neat. And on Monday Courtney Love is playing at the Troubadour and I tried to get tickets but they sold out in about a minute and I was crushed. The last time I saw Courtney was Halloween weekend nine years ago: she wore a red dress and devil horns and sang "Cod'ine" by Buffy Sainte-Marie, and at one point between songs she said something like, "You guys I'm soooooo sick of going to jail, make it stop!", all fake-whining and stomping her feet. That was cute. I fucking love Courtney. The whole point of my adding this paragraph to this post is I want someone to read it and go, "Oh, here, you can just have my ticket," and then I will get to go see Courtney Love on Monday night and it will totally revitalize me. Here's a great picture of Courtney and her American thighs: