One of the strongest feelings belonging to human nature is the mental or emotional drawing to a specific place in the world. Often its a place we’ve never been to. A lot of it ties into our natural feeling of wanderlust and the constant urge to just up sticks, travel, and see the world. At time of writing this I have around four months left to wait before my life changing journey across the Atlantic to commence my two-week road trip of America.
This is something I’ve planned for about a year and of all the many highlights I can’t wait to experience first hand. Of all of these though, seeing California with my own eyes excites me the most. So it seemed pretty apt that around the time of the imminent release of Best Coast‘s recent LP California Nights, I jumped at the chance to write about it.
Hailing from Los Angeles themselves, the duo have thus far released two albums of summery, indie pop rock and first piqued my interest in 2010 with the release of their debut Crazy For You, an album that I refuse to hear a bad word about.
California Nights opens with “Feeling OK” which is extremely tough to listen to without smiling. Cosentino’s tongue in cheek lyrics about being in a good mood despite everything are poignant and simple. Her voice itself is like a snapshot of every great pop rock track from the 90’s, For a band with just two people, Best Coast sure make a lot of noise on “Heaven Sent” which for all its speed and brashness still retains it’s pop infectiousness and appeal.
California Nights is just one catchy song after another to a point when it becomes relentless. “In My Eyes” and “Jealousy” are prime examples of this, each one becoming an instant earworm after just one listen. The relative ease in which Best Coast are able to create such simple yet effective pop hooks in each song off this album is staggering. Many bands struggling to break through seem to desperate to land that one song that will get them on the radio and linger in the charts for an extensive period, yet Best Coast have put together an entire album of them.
The LP’s curveball is its title track. “California Nights” is the album’s slowest song as well as the longest, sauntering along at an almost pedestrian speed with Cosentino stretching each syllable out as long as possible. It’s the cat amongst the pigeons when compared to the rest of the album’s fast-faced tracks.
The other half of Best Coast, multi-instumentalist Bobb Bruno, is the band’s jack of all trades. Not just content to be the band’s drummer, Bruno also takes on bass, lead guitar, and production responsibilities and altogether fills in the gaps and ultimately gives Best Coast that more ‘complete’ sound that musical duos have to work harder to achieve.
Granted, the band hire a couple of session musicians when performing live but in the studio the pair of them sound like they’ve been making music for decades. The band are loosely originated on music by bands such as The Beach Boys and The Beatles as well as numerous other 1960’s pop groups, which rings true as you can definitely recognise the strict verse-chorus-verse structure of Best Coast’s songs. There is nothing strict about the music though. There seems to be only one rule and that’s to take it easy and have as much fun as possible. Which (correct me if I’m wrong) seems to be the Californian way.
For someone such as myself carrying such a tremendous amount of wanderlust in my being, Best Coast’s California Nights typifies the kind of emotions that I expect to feel when I finally get to see the band’s origin. The album itself is utterly faultless from start to finish and I continued listening to it well after I’d finished writing this review.
Rating: 5/5