ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: JULY 26TH 2010


I’m pretty sure more than two albums released in 2010 featured kitties on their covers but two in particular stood out and where the Klaxons may have produced nothing more than a stand out cover with their disappointing sophomore album, at least Best Coast matched their kitsch record cover with equally memorable pop hooks. Fronted by vocalist Beth Cosentino, Best Coast were formed out of the splitting of her previous band Pocahaunted which traversed the indie underground with their own brand of hypnotic drone. They never really took off and their highlight was supporting Sonic Youth in 2007. Needless to say, Best Coast have hit the ground running. Cosentino is joined by Bobb Bruno and Ali Koehler and together they crafted Crazy For You, an album which almost serves as a concept piece with each song designed as a direct reference to that most popular theme of popular music: love. Crazy For You would probably fall flat were it not for these adorable melodies. Thankfully they prop up some rather base lyrics, which by all accounts are relatively well-placed due to the surfer brand of soft Sixties pop at work here; it’s not difficult to imagine these songs as the soundtrack to every teenage girls’ experience of first love in 1963.


Aside from love and heartache there aren’t many other themes at work here and halfway through this pursuit begins to wear a little thin. The longest song is three minutes giving you an idea of how fleeting this record can be. It works because very few (if any) popular songs from the early Sixties would’ve dared exceed the classic four minute slot. As a result songs like The End and the joyous lead single Boyfriend feel like pastiches designed to convince you of a time and a place that is sadly missed. Of course with romanticism comes simplification, the tendency to focus on the good times and forget about complications. “There’s something about the summer,” repeats Cosentino in Summer Mood. The melodrama at work on Crazy For You is relentless and whilst there’s an even split between the classic trend of elation and deflation of being in love, it never feels down-trodden or defeatist, for with the angst comes a monotonous, Generation X kind of attitude; to quote Lisa Simpson, “We’re part of the MTV generation, we feel neither highs nor lows.”

It helps that these guys hail from LA, too. Every song is drenched in a summer haze, but it’s not the guitars that create this effect, or even the drums. Cosentino’s vocals are streamlined to surf waves just as smoothly as Californian highways. Simply put, she knows how to impassion Crazy For You on what would be otherwise fairly standard instrumental fodder. When The Sun Don’t Shine is undoubtedly the highlight here, a beautiful vocal-layered ditty through which Cosentino reveals her love for the object of her affection, cooing her way through dream pop balladry. The aforementioned monotony becomes endearing with each subsequent listen. There’s a feeling of Cosentino wearing her heart on her sleeve through revealing more about her protagonist’s faults and insecurities (“She’s prettier and skinnier, she has a college degree”) to draw her listeners in despite how fed-up she sometimes sounds. And yet what’s interesting is that this approach could be interpreted as mere personification. After living in New York for a year, Cosentino became so homesick and the bulk of Crazy For You acts as a boisterous love letter to California, the true great love of her life.


It’s quite impossible to consider how Crazy For You has faired over the year since it was released. The trajectory of Best Coast has been the expected one: a steady rise that is neither considerably seismic or underwhelming and they’ve served their market fair enough by playing most of the major festival circuit, both in the US and here in the UK. The music on this record is so invested in its retro-pastiche of 1960s surfer pop that assessing how it holds up is not relevant yet. What’s always been brilliant about pop music is that it can almost immediately bring the listener to an emotional location that is easily understood by most people, usually with no more than a few notes or beats. Feel good music generally endears for years to come, and Crazy For You wears a big Cheshire Cat grin from ear to ear.