Best Coast- Crazy For You (Wichita)

Best Coast- Crazy For You (Wichita)







Best Coast is Bethany Consentino, a Californian who bases Best Coast on her memories and longings for home whilst attending college in New York City. Bethany has already taken part in several talent contest, created a teen pop band which saw her being chased by music industry interested in making her the next teen pop sensation. Bethany then promptly ran a million miles and joined pocahaunted and now this precocoious young talent reincarnates her spirit in Best Coast, following the wake of the Dum Dum Girls, uses noise-pop as a trampoline to create Crazy For You an album which shimmers with the California Summer's lethal cocktail of drugs, love and longing.


"Crazy for you" is a vision of a time we've all had/dreamed of/imagined, it is at times a album about longing, about boredom, about breaking up, about pain, about self punishment but also about strength. Best Coast has essentially created a simple summer surf pop album which easily addresses so many issues that everyone can in one way or another relate to, proving what a massive appeal Bethany's songs have to a mainstream audience. The relationship(s) that BC explores throughout the record with herself and other people teeter between love and hate depending on the move, essentially making this either a summer love or a breakup album, at times both.
Starting from the strong teenage like longing in "Boyfriend" which is a simple tale of having a crush on someone which feels like so much more but you have to overcome the hurdles (in the case a girl prettier and skinnier) to get what you want. While "The End" maintains a prescribed view of a teenage girls diary stating how vitally important love is singing "Last night, I went out with this guy, he was nice, he was nice and cute, but he was not you."

While the title track and "Goodbye" toy with the destructive side of love, the latter's drug induced paranoia playing out as Bethany sings "Everytime you leave this house, everything falls apart, I dont love you, I dont hate you, I dont know how I feel. Everytime you walk away I feel like I could cry, but I would never really cry because your the worst at goodbyes..."


Crazy for you is the most complicated relationship you've ever had, at times so sweet and loving while other times self-destructive and harmful, never once deciding whether you are better off together ("Happy") or literally a country apart ("Bratty B"), but despite the situation it seems that anything is better than being alone, that love can be hurtful but it's worth it in the end. The songs are dripping in some loved up resentment as Bethany's voice is dripping in reverb fuelled by meaningful promises and introspective insights into herself. While musically the album constantly borrows so many 90s riot grrl-isms (Bethany herself credits Hole and Courtney Love as an influences) but delievered in a harsh sweetness that Jenny Lewis (again a noted inspiriation) would have made on The Intitial Friend EP.

Crazy for you could be easily dismissed as the soundtrack to a girls first relationship and subsquent heartbreak, when it turns out her soulmate is merely a bag of shit interested in a lot more than what is a sweet yet fucked up relationship. But this album is so much more, it's joyfully naive, older than it's year bitter and contains something that will appeal to anyone who has ever experienced a heavy resentful heartbreak and has as in the lyrics to middle track "I Want To," "Go Back to the first time, the first place." One of the most brutal, sweet and sour records of our generation. 10/10