Best Coast’s debut album Crazy For You is like a lot of things: Lying in the sunny spot on the shag carpet trying to pick bits of weed out from Chips Ahoy crumbs and cat fur; a bitter slice of life from the frontiers of post-feminist living; the sort of music Oedipa Maas would listen to as she journeys around California on her ultimately deranged quest. But what it’s most like is too many scoops of cotton candy ice cream in an overflowing glass of cognac and Coca Cola.
Is Bethany Cosentino high? (Hah, yes.) Every song on the album is at the same time a joy to listen to and aural torture. The sound of the album refers to gauzy 60s surf rock and slacker 90s alternative rock. In other words, the album’s bona fides check out. To people our age, Crazy For You is a very appealing record. Unfortunately, it suffers from being made for people our age. It’s made to be muzak for your next trip to Urban Outfitters. Unlike her previous 7″s and singles, the album lacks both lo-fi charm and sensible mixing. Every song (excepting the last) is too loud and obnoxious to hear for very long. The record has an ostensible lo-fi sound, but the texture of it is wielded more as a stylistic choice than a material necessity. The recording lacks dynamics, and its consistent guitar tone — at first is quite pleasing — starts to grate. Its crackles and pops are not recording artifacts or spontaneous ephemera from the equipment; that’s just the sound of too much volume. Crazy For You seems a little disingenuous in that the sound merely refers to the warmth of poor quality and vintage equipment, but what it actually presents is an almost clinical representation of the punishing digital representation of sound. The only song that comes close to capturing the charming, warm sound of her earlier recordings is the final track, “When I’m With You,” which is the only older song to appear on the album. It’s listenability seems like a fortunate accident.
Lyrically, the record also presents a curiously cruel give and take. At times it offers heartbreaking candor and self-inquisitive aptness. Lines like “I lost my job / I miss my mom / I wish my cat could talk” and “The other girl is not like me / She’s prettier and skinnier / She has a college degree / I dropped out when I was seventeen” give us a glimpse of the shut it, stoned out humor and self-doubt that everyone experiences when they’re having a summer bummer. On the other hand, most of the songs read like they’re straight from a seventeen year old’s journal. They’re all simple self-loathing, worthlessness, and boy craziness. I have to return again to “When I’m With You,” because it’s honestly the only great song on an otherwise kind of all-right album. Its pleasing refrain of “The world is crazy / But you and me / We’re just crazy, so / When I’m with you I have fun” sets the listener’s expectations perfectly. It’s a simple, fun rock song that expresses one of the most common human conditions, looking for shelter from the uncanniness of the world by pairing off with another searcher. It’s about a fully integrated We that’s against a likely malicious Them, which is what weed paranoia is all about. Rather than expressing disgust with herself, or her generally unappealing tendency to wait by the phone for another guy (why does she like him so much? she never says), it sets the table and gives us a pretty simple, sweet meal. The rest of the album could give pablum a bad name.
Crazy For You is ultimately a pretty large success, despite all. It was clearly created for summer barbecues, driving with the windows open, and playing at the beach. The record is an anodyne for the summer heat and its sometimes endless loneliness. Except, of course, the summer does end, and so does loneliness. When its fall or winter, I can’t see Crazy For You being that great of an album, and I can’t see Best Coast being a band with a career unless they develop fast. Or only release albums in July.
I think that Best Coast is essentially a novelty act. A fuzzy, lo-fi, droning version of April March – which I love, because I love novelty genre mash groups. But these groups never last because eventually they get really good at the imitation, but aren’t in a position to move away from that sound organically. Probably because they are being asked to go from writing musical fan fiction to writing something new? I don’t know. I like the album, I just hope the next one is completely different.
I entirely agree with you, Garland. Their novelty could otherwise be considered a strength, oddly, in this climate (musical/temperature). But yes. They are a little limited.