Best Coast
Crazy for You
Release Date: Jul 27, 2010
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Alternative Pop/Rock, Indie Pop, Noise Pop
Record label: Mexican Summer
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Album Review: Crazy for You by Best Coast
Excellent, Based on 10 Critics
Based on rating 85%%
Ready for your summer crush? Missing the debased lo-fi fuzz of its previous 7-inches, Best Coast’s first LP is still a clear good vibration in complication amour, resonating through hot, stoned days of West Coast love and lonely, sleepless nights of unanswered phone calls. As Bethany Cosentino aptly mopes: “Ooh I want you, but there’s something about the summer that makes me moody.” As a wholly L.A. affair—sorry, Katy Perry—here’s the record about California girls.
Based on rating 8.4/10
Scene-famous boyfriends, a quote-generating Twitter feed, scuffles with bloggers, and the most meme-generating feline since Keyboard Cat got carpal tunnel: Yeah, it's safe to say Bethany Cosentino, who writes and records with cohort Bobb Bruno as Best Coast, is a long way away from her days as a member of drone/psych outfit Pocahaunted. Best Coast's full-length debut, Crazy for You, serves only to increase that distance from the outré-music scene; the brief record delivers on the promise of a strong string of singles released over the past year. Just as Pocahaunted loosely capture the basic feel of dub and reggae, Crazy for You is a meditation on the stickier hooks of classic indie pop, with slight detours into surf-rock ("Bratty B") and countrypolitan balladry ("Our Deal").
Based on rating 8/10
The duo of Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno are firm believers in simplicity. The songs they record as Best Coast are straight-ahead verse-chorus tunes influenced by various strains of pop and rock from the last 50 years (doo wop, garage rock, girl groups, early punk, '90s indie rock), played without frills and sung super-earnestly. In the hands of people less talented, the end result could have been generic at best, snooze-inducing at worst.
Based on rating 8/10
To hear Best Coast’s throwback indie-pop, it can be hard to tell whether frontwoman Bethany Cosentino is an old-fashioned hopeless romantic or a Twitter-era AD/HD flirt, the blogosphere’s it-girl of the moment. As a songwriter, Cosentino has a command of the necessary elements that go into pop songs that could stand the test of time, while having a good sense of what’s current musically and culturally. You can hear her keen grasp of past and present on the title track of Crazy for You and on the doo-woppy “The End”, both of which sound like Cosentino and collaborator Bobb Bruno could’ve sampled the “oohs” and “ahhs” from an obscure 1960s compilation, then posted ‘em straight on their MySpace page.
Based on rating 8.0/10
Not too long ago I read a pretty insipid blog post where the author felt compelled to talk about the way Best Coast made her "feel. " She went on and on about how Bethany Cosentino and company's music makes her feel the way she did when she was a teenager, a time fraught with misunderstandings about the world that, not too much later, she's put behind her. That thinking encompasses a whole vague set of emotions about adolescence that mature adults generally relegate to a shadowy nether realm that's largely dismissed as silly and frivilous and illegitimate.
Based on rating 4/5
Aprolific marijuana smoker, Twitterer and cat enthusiast, young Los Angeleno Bethany Cosentino is interesting enough as a web entity alone – she also hosts a blog mainly consisting of YouTube clips of the TV shows of her youth. But as half of Best Coast (she's joined by bassist Bobb Bruno) she's equally good value. A veteran of the LA rock scene centred around the Smell club that birthed the noisy No Age and others, Cosentino moved from the drone of her old group Pocahunted to Best Coast's esoterically pleasing, scuzzy take on girl-group pop.
Based on rating 7.4/10
Listen to Best Coast’s Crazy for You. —. Summer lovin’.
Opinion: Excellent
Winning melodies, vivid choruses, memorable hooks and lyrics to make your heart hiccup. Stevie Chick 2010 Much of the abundant charm of Crazy for You, the debut album from LA trio Best Coast, lies in its nostalgic sense of innocence. Awash with summery haze and glorious harmonies, and dulcet soft-pop melodies that evoke the dreamy confections of the Brill Building girl group era, Bethany Cosentino pens songs that essay love and all its attendant anguishes in the language of True Romance comics, in words scrawled by heart-broken teenagers on postcards to their best friends, with a seeming belief that all heartaches can somehow be resolved with a handful of verses and a chorus that makes your heart hiccup.
Opinion: Fairly Good
Best Coast At first the sentiments seem to be pure pop in Bethany Cosentino’s songs on “Crazy for You” (Mexican Summer) by Best Coast. “I wish he was my boyfriend.” “You’re the one for me.” So are the structures: two- or three-minute songs with a big girl-group beat, a few chords, succinct melody lines and room for vocal-harmony oohs and ahs. And so is her voice, girlish and unmannered.
Opinion: Average
Blazed West Coast couple Bethany Consentino (Best Coast) and Nathan Williams (Wavves) seem like the perfect pair: She's got the blissed-out melodies, and he's got the danked-out pop-punk. Best Coast's debut is ostensibly about her boyfriend, if breezy opener "Boyfriend" or the catchy title track didn't make it clear. Consentino's certainly got an ear for a hook, and her trio makes good use of them, but you can only sing about your cat, weed, and loneliness for so many songs.
'Crazy for You'
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