Best Coast?

2010 has been a strange year for music. Strange in a sense that there has been a stream of good music, but nothing that has got the blogosphere truly salivating. There hasn't been the groundbreaker, nor indeed a huge bolt from the blue, it's all been so...predictable. Maybe that's the fault of the internet, and every blog so desperate to impress there's nothing left to the imagination anymore. Or maybe it's the fault of the artists. Maybe it’s our fault?

So what does an increasingly irrelevant rag like NME do? It needs to (for whatever reason) overhype and form a strange loyalty to an up-and-coming band likely to be successful anyway. But in 2010 there haven’t been many up-and-comers releasing standout material that would have even the slightest chance of getting picked up by the frightening world of commercial radio.

So along comes a band like Best Coast. And by ‘along comes I mean about 12 months of hype, mp3s coming in dribs and drabs, home-made 7 inches, ‘under produced, kick-ass melodies.’ Perhaps most weirdly, they were coined a ‘chillwave’ artist by MTVU, when they are practically anything but. Now Best Coast doesn't have a commercial sound by any means, it's right up there in the Vivian Girls league of under produced, gnawing at your skull pop. But what they do have is marketability. Female lead singers of alternative bands always seem to ooze sex appeal, and along with sex appeal seems to comes a slight inflation of how good the music actually is (i.e Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Beach House, Sleigh Bells to name a few.) And not only does Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast have sex appeal, she has a cat that tweets @snacksthecat, and a boyfriend in Nathan Williams of fellow lo-fi juggernauts, Wavves. It's the kind of stuff that is fodder to blogs the world over, especially to the tongue in cheek ramblings of Carles of the Alt Report/Hipster Runoff fame. 

Best Coast’s eagerly awaited 2010 album, ‘Crazy for You’ has admittedly, attracted far more attention than we at NAS could have ever expected. Even over here, whilst on sabbatical in London, the most trashiest of daily papers have got their hands on it and featured it for review. And some of these reviews make the best reading. Because 90% of the time, these reviewers from these publications, haven't been involved in the hype, for them it’s just another album. So essentially you are getting an objective review. These reviews have generally gone along the lines of - sure, there are some great melodies, but the whole shtick wears off after half an hour, you feel like once you’ve heard once song, you’ve heard it all. An opinion I honestly agree with.

But this hasn't stopped the hype, in fact NME came out not so long ago and coined Best Coast as ‘the best new band of 2010.’ We had to have a laugh here at NAS HQ, around 90% of their 50 strong list of ‘new bands of 2010’ we were playing early into 2009 (like any good indie kid, we love a ‘we we there first’ type story.) Pitchfork, most likely realising the album was not groundbreaking, but not wanting to write off a band they had been talking up for 12 months, went the safe Best New Music 8.4 – interestingly the same score as Wavves 2010 release, King of the Beach.

Here’s where my main bug bare lies, and of course, I KNOW this is all subjective, but King of the Beach is such a classier album on almost every level than Crazy For You. Its immediately relistenable and filled with so many more hooks, tricks and dare I say, ‘banging’ tunes. To be fair, Wavves gets plenty of attention, sometimes for the wrong reasons, but what about a band like the Smith Westerns? The Smith Westerns make similar music to Best Coast on a lo-fi, short and sweet, pop rock level. The Chicago youngsters released their mesmerising self-titled album in 2009 to some nice reviews and occasional blog article, they even went on tour with 2009 darlings Girls, but I dare say your trashy London newspaper didn’t grab a copy of their album, I would also suggest NME hasn’t given them the same amount of love, even though I did spot them, confusingly again, in the top 50 new band of 2010. If ‘The Smith Westerns’ isn't a better album than ‘Crazy For You’ I'll eat as many hats as one human can - but it goes to prove, even in an indie world, sex still sells.

[The Smith Westerns - 4 Free Mp3's]
[Best Coast - When I'm With You]
[Wavves - Post Acid]