Sarah Mastroni – News Editor –
They have sold records and they have toured the country. Their style is innovative, refreshing, and a pleasant change from the ongoing, droning beats of Top 40 radio.
As much as fans hope their precious tunes avoid surfacing to sellout status, there is no reason why people should be settling for what the touch of that car radio button tries to sell.
Best Coast is a California duo with sounds reminiscent of beachy 1960’s pop.
Luckily for music lovers who want to steer away from the pop scene, their music can also be compared to a garage rock sound.
With Bethany Cosentino, a quirky 25-year-old West-Coaster, on vocals and Bob Bruno on guitar, the music never gets mellow to the point where you want to take a nap, but maybe just enough where a relaxing afternoon on Venice Beach would suffice.
Best Coast’s latest album debuted on the Billboard charts Top Alternative albums and Top 200.
In 2009, the Cali-based duo struck a chord with alternative rock music lovers with their hit “Boyfriend,” a catchy tune with a nice semi-soft-rock base which catches Cosentino’s hopefulness for that one special relationship.
Dropping this past May to a well-receiving audience, Cosentino told the popular U.K. newspaper, The Guardian, that she wanted their sophomore album,“The Only Place,” to inspire “babies to be created to this music.”
If fans took Cosentino’s advice, a lot of babies would be well underway as of this September.
The band’s May album debuted on Billboard’s Top Alterwnative Albums of the Week at number six and rounded out with the general music population at number 24 on the Billboard Top 200 in all genres.
However, in a survey conducted on Southern’s campus this past week, only two out of twenty students have ever heard of Best Coast. While these twenty students do not fully exemplify the band’s fanbase on campus, it certainly says that regardless of Billboard Magazine–or whatever top-name music magazine–people (possibly outside of California and the hipster-central parts of New York City) are not getting enough diversified music but rather the same old pop, hip-hop, top 40 mix.
The band’s hit second album has gone through some fine-tuning, rounding out the sighs of failed relationships to more positive vibes. The album has a thirteen song setlist detailing more mature ways of dealing with breakups and doomed relationships–like spending all your money and waking up wondering where it all went, eh-hem, “How They Want Me to Be.”
Totally relatable to the typical college-student, no?
Best Coast’s first single release, “The Only Place,” after the same album name, is nothing short of inspiring and jealousy-provoking. Cosentino rhymes a beach fiend’s trigger words neatly, likely sparking the interest in immediately partaking in some summer fun, no matter what frigid climate one may actually live in.
The idea that California has everything is what makes their songs so inviting. “We’ve got the mountains, got the waves, got the sun, we’ve got the babes,” Cosentino sings, making the first single off their much anticipated second album an escape for any of its listeners.
Other tracks like “Do You Love Me Like You Used To” play out those typical relationship emotions in the best, most upbeat way a heartbroken young girl or guy could possibly feel without sadness. Who knew it was possible?
Selling out their first show this past July at New York City’s Terminal 5, a venue that holds over 3,000 people, Best Coast took a new twist in their adventures in the East Coast, covering the Fleetwood Mac classic “Storms.”
The band continues to sweep the country, not just California, with their uplifting view on everything that brings people down–and up, like loving their pet cats– with the best way they know how: quick, upbeat guitar strumming and catchy choruses that stray outside the pop spectrum and right on over to the that special land known more familiarly to young adult music lovers across the world as alternative rock.
Overall: 4 out of 5 Owls
