Best
Coast is the West Coast Ramones with a Josephine instead of a Joey. It’s really
really true. Best Coast capitalizes on the same musical and lyrical strengths
that made the Ramones so timelessly kick butt-able, namely a hyperbolic use of
minimalism. An analysis of Ramones lyrics reveal keen interests in girls,
drugs, and doing nothing in New York City for incredibly long stretches of
time. Likewise, Bethany Cosentino appears patriotically devoted to boys, pot, and
“fun-fun-fun” in the California sun. And in the same way that Johnny Ramone
found an angst-driven guitar mode that shaped the Ramones unmistakable feverish
sound, Best Coast’s Bobb Bruno seems to have found his pickadilly niche somewhere
between alt country and surf rock, slithering whiskey rhythms through a mai tai
lazy haze.
So
when you boil it down, I love Best Coast because I love the Ramones. And,
surely, I just won hell-points on someone’s uncool list for that statement.
Best
Coast’s sophomore release, The Only Place,
progresses the band leagues ahead of their self-titled debut. While the music
feels familiar and seminally Best Coast, better production and more
sophisticated song-crafting exalt everything in Best Coast’s sound. On The Only Place, Bruno’s guitar swirls
rather than fuzzes, and, while he still doesn’t wang out bridges or solos,
Bruno feels more intentional with his craft, no longer depending on walls of
static to build a two-and-a-half-minute-plus structure of laxidasical pop. And
where the vocals took the backseat on Best Coast’s debut, echoing as if sheepishly
recorded down a hall from the main studio, Consentino is now front and center,
shining clean and confident on each track. In spite of all this newness,
however, lyrics still feel repetitive to the point of anthem or despair, given your
state of mind or esteem, or (let’s be honest) ether.
Even so, The Only Place is a yearning, hungry,
barren but hopeful – dare I say, pretty – record. I’ve had The Only Place on repeat for four days solid, and I can say with
all certainty that it’s not the kind of record that would make The Jerk’s Navin R. Johnson dance around
the room and “want to be somebody.” In fact, The Only Place has the opposite effect. It’s a musical vacation, an
auditory veg out, moving at the pace of LA traffic rather than LA ambition. Stand
out tracks like “How They Want Me To Be” and “Up All Night” demand blank-brain
window gazing, while the more upbeat “The Only Place” (a love song to
California), “Let’s Go Home” and “Do You Love Me Like You Used To” inspire
introspection more than action.
Like the Ramones, Best
Coast thrives on wanting. On pining. On dissatisfaction. Thus, the lyrical,
swirling repetition. Thus, the material obsession. Just ask Joey and Johnny:
whether girls or boys, glue or pot, Rockaway or L.A., the need for something more
than right here and right now exists. We’re not as autonomous as we’d like to
believe. We need our homes. Our friends. Our partners. Even our substances. All
reminding us that right now is not perfect. It will never be. So there’s art.
And there’s hunger. Enough art and hunger, even in two distinctly similar and
different bands, for too many records and too many songs to never reach the end
of either. So it goes until we arrive at or evolve to something better.
