Surf. Garage. Indie. Motown. ’50s pop. Grunge. Lo-fi. Fuzz. Doo-wop. Roll up all of these genres together in somewhat equal portions (in a tortilla with avocado), and you have Best Coast, the charming trio from Los Angeles, California, composed of Bethany Cosentino, Bobb Bruno, and Ali Koehler.
Best Coast’s exceptional debut LP, Crazy For You, (released by label Mexican Summer) is replete, from start to finish, with the commonly linked themes of love, longing, pining, wanting, missing, and desiring to just start over. These motifs are boiled down, reduced, and concentrated in the record’s median track, “I Want To.” Over slow and repetitive guitar strokes, drum thuds, and tambourine shakes, Cosentino pleads simply, “I want you. So much… I miss you. So much…”
Then a pause and a shift. The final 49 seconds escape the desirous march of the preceding 2 minutes and rush to a conclusion as Cosentino presents a solution to her lamentations: “I want to, go back to, the first time, the first place.” Desperation sets in, and the only way to cure the wanting and the missing is a fresh start, a relationship re-birth… Or time travel. Whatever works, it doesn’t matter, as long as a reunion is the end result.
Pick up Crazy For You HERE. You’d be crazy not to…