Review Summary: Beth Cosentino is lovesick and she wants you to know it.
"I wish he was my boyfriend," goes the opening line of, "Boyfriend," the first track on Best Coast's debut full-length,
Crazy For You. It's your typical love story, the kind that "You Belong With Me" exploited and made billions of dollars from. We all know what it's like to love somebody and not be loved back. The sentiment isn't anything new, but that doesn't make it any less effective, and Bethany Cosentino's sun-soaked vocals and Bobb Bruno's overdriven guitars work together to transform what could have just been a cheesy lo-fi antithesis to Avril Lavigne's ingratiating "Girlfriend" into one of the most enjoyable songs of the summer.
The rest of
Crazy For You follows in the vein of "Boyfriend" - like Sleigh Bells'
Treats, another high-profile debut released this year,
Crazy For You establishes its aesthetic early on and sticks with it. Lyrically, the theme is clear - Cosentino is lovesick and she wants you to know it. If the album can feel redundant at times (she sings "I want you" a few too many times and some of the songs sound line-crossingly similar to each other), it is saved by Cosentino's superior musicianship. Every song has a memorable hook, and the lazy garage pop sound Best Coast has adopted here is, quite frankly, gorgeous. Although the persistent neediness of Cosentino's lyrics can get irritating, there is occasional self-deprecating humor to lighten the proceedings; "Every time you go away, I feel like I could cry," Cosentino sings dejectedly on "Goodbye," before flipping the sentiment around, saying disdainfully, "But I would never really cry, 'cause you're the worst at goodbyes."
Moments like these make it difficult to tell whether or not Cosentino is poking fun at our culture's depiction of young girls as damsels that need a hot prince to save them or if she honestly is as dependent on men as her lyrics make her seem. On one of the most charming songs on the album, "Bratty B", Cosentino sings, "Pick up the phone/I wanna talk/about my day/it really sucked," and it's impossible to read this as anything other than self-effacing. Yet
Crazy For You isn't overly self-conscious (unlike frequent comparison Wavves' utterly banal
King of the Beach), which allows Cosentino's occasionally maudlin lyrics to feel genuine and ultimately appealing.
Perhaps one could say that Best Coast is delivering sly feminist commentary along with their unironic heartbreak anthems. But although it may be interesting to talk about it on a purely intellectual level, Best Coast's debut is best enjoyed simply as good pop music. And although the term "seasonal music" is overused to the point of it being meaningless,
Crazy For You, with its fuzzy guitars and pools of reverb, might just be the perfect summer album.
