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Courtney Barnett performing at the Chicago Cultural Center on Monday.
Nuccio DiNuzzo / Chicago Tribune
Courtney Barnett performing at the Chicago Cultural Center on Monday.
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Courtney Barnett sings a lot of songs about cocooning with friends and just wanting to disappear. She’s not exactly born to be on stage. But her guitar has a nasty streak, and she made the most of the contrast between the everyday details in her lyrics and the boldness in her solos.

Barnett’s quartet sounded a little murky Monday at Preston Bradley Hall in the Chicago Cultural Center. Fortunately her voice and guitar were right out front, boxing with Dave Mudie’s sharp drumming. Barnett teased out the dynamics in her arrangements: the dreamy, psychedelic coda to “City Looks Pretty,” the way “Nameless, Faceless” dropped down to just voice and drums, punctuated by a feedback-saturated guitar statement.

A veteran of the Australian bar-band scene long before the rest of the world was paying attention, Barnett has developed a strong feel for how to pace a show. It doesn’t hurt that her songwriting standards have remained consistently high, as affirmed by her latest album, “Tell Me How You Really Feel,” which she performed in its entirety.

“Hopefulessness” started small and gained strength with Barnett’s rhythm-lead lines navigating a slow, inexorable surge. It was a song of consolation amid chaos — not that Barnett ignored the chaos. Her guitar tone veered between melody and mayhem, and she worked the six strings with a roll of her right shoulder, a turn of her left hip, almost as if it were a percussion instrument.

The dry humor in “Charity” contrasted with a riff so craggy it could serve as a template for the next Neil Young album with Crazy Horse. A sing-songy chorus mocked the self-deprecating sentiments in “Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Self Confidence” and the country-ish lilt of “Help Your Self” got jammed through a trash compactor of a solo.

She turned the affirming “Sunday Roast,” about locking out the day’s troubles with a few pals, into an unlikely anthem, and smartly paired it with the song that first broke her to an international audience in 2014, “Avant Gardener,” about an anxiety attack. “Do anything to take my mind off where it’s supposed to be,” she sang, a deceptively modest goal that somehow felt like a necessity amid the swirling colors conjured by her guitar.

As she explored her back catalog, the guitarist pulled together various strands of influences: The chiming Dunedin sound of New Zealand indie rock from the ‘80s on “Don’t Apply Compression Gently,” the blues-filtered-through-Jimi-Hendrix-isms of the staggering “Small Poppies,” the garage-rock bash of “History Eraser,” and the moody atmospherics of “Anonymous Club.” The latter was another song in which Barnett yearned to quietly fade into the darkness, only to come storming back with the refusal of “Pedestrian at Best.” She was a woman who longed to close the door behind her, but her guitar kept busting it down.

Courtney Barnett set list Monday:

1. Hopefulessness

2. City Looks Pretty

3. Charity

4. Need a Little Time

5. Nameless, Faceless

6. I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch

7. Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Self Confidence

8. Help Your Self

9. Walkin’ on Eggshells

10. Sunday Roast

11. Avant Gardener

12. Don’t Apply Compression Gently

13. Small Poppies

14. Elevator Operator

15. Depreston

16. History Eraser

Encore:

17. Anonymous Club

18. Pedestrian at Best

Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.

greg@gregkot.com

Twitter @gregkot