Best Coast
Crazy For You
Rating: 4.5/5.0
Label: Mexican Summer
Indie rock often seems like one big clever-off as we, the discerning listeners amongst the elite group known as “people with ears,” search for the next Animal Collective and award a staggering 9.973 rating to a no-fi opus from an outsider artist turned insider folkster who’s taken to playing a two-stringed guitar with objects fashioned from nail clippings. Because, you know, he sings about Vikings and not girls. We scoff at the simple, the straightforward and the obvious. Such a notion is, quite frankly, pretentious bullshit.
Enter Best Coast: songwriter Bethany Cosentino with multi-instrumentalist Bobb Bruno and recently-added drummer Ali Koehler. That a band like Best Coast is surrounded by hype proves a refreshing antidote to our insecure tendency to embrace the obscure and the cosmopolitan when we all really just want to listen to power pop and eat pizza. In these days of poses and pop stars in costumes that look like they’ve been repurposed from Superman: The Movie, we could use a bit of honesty. And Best Coast is almost entirely honesty.
You can hear this honesty in opener “Boyfriend”: “I wish he was my boyfriend/ I’d love him ’til the very end/ But instead he is just a friend.” In this respect, every track on Crazy For You is identical, espousing notions like, “I wish we could go back to when I was 17,”When I’m with you I have fun” or “I always freak when I get high,” sentiments which pretty accurately sum up Crazy For You as an indie garage rock record about boys, adult insecurity and weed.
Did I say garage? That’s a bit of a misnomer, considering how much Crazy For You chills in the realm of beachiness. No surprise for a record with a song called “Summer Mood” that’s perfect for a sunset. In fact, the entire album’s fuzzy, surf-rock stylings make me want to hear this entire record at sunset. It’s warm and friendly and I kind of just want to dig my toes into the sand, but I’ve carpet under my feet and I rarely vacuum. So I’ll listen to Best Coast and let that fuel my imagination.
Though Bruno’s surf-rock instrumentation is near-perfect and indispensable to the record’s infectiousness, Cosentino is the star of the show. Her voice is firm yet girly, with undercurrents of the longing of a young adult. Uttering such frank lyrics makes for a very conversational sort of album, but one not without its share of blissful ooh-ooh-oohs. It’s an irresistibly unpretentious half-hour of quality time at the beach, especially since the longest song on the album just barely creeps past three minutes.
The straightforwardness leaves room for a couple of uplifting surprises. The slow, longing “I Want To” carries on for nearly two minutes of deliberate guitar and repetition of “I-ee-I-ee-I want you so much” occasionally punctuated by tambourine and percussion before suddenly- shockingly- ramping up in the final 50 seconds to a beautifully super-compressed burst of rock ‘n’ roll desire. This is only rivaled by “Our Deal,” a dreamy song about casual lovers that attacks the part of the brain that makes the head involuntarily sway to the music. Listen and feel your eyes close against your will.
Let the backlash begin, as nothing Best Coast has to say is particularly fresh or new, but this is the most important thing about Crazy For You. It reminds us of the universals; we’re always going to pine after people who are just friends, chill out at the beach and get high and we will always need music to relate this from a perspective we can identify with- in this case, that of a 23-year-old woman. “Hey,” the album says, “This is music about how I feel and do you wanna hang out sometime?” Okay, Best Coast. Let’s hang.
