Bethany Cosentino is dreamy. Whether she's looking for lost love or hiding from it by way of marijuana, her head always seems to be stuck in the clouds. Over the last year, Cosentino—alongside buddy Bobb Bruno under the moniker Best Coast—has released a slew of EP's and 7""s that capture the dreary-eyed blankness of a recluse in love and forge a middle ground between pop culture's romanticism and the real world's despair. The California trio's debut LP, Crazy For You, stays the course, but in a deliberately sunnier way that pays dividends in its directness.
The lo-fi aesthetics of the band's pre-LP releases did little to separate them from other female-led, pop-punk bands like Dum Dum Girls and Vivian Girls, but on Crazy for You, Best Coast infuse the punchy rhythms with looping vocals and razor-sharp harmonies that evoke the Crystals more than the Runaways or Bikini Kill. Whereas their contemporaries try to write punk songs that pop, Best Coast write pop songs that kick.
And for the most part, Crazy For You kicks like a soccer-playing toddler—wildly and repeatedly, poking around the same spot of land from different angles to make absolutely sure the ball gets out of there. After wallowing through nearly two minutes of restless cooing on ""I Want To,"" Cosentino drags herself back to a swooning melody of reflection. The head-in-the-sand groveling on ""Honey"" takes an abrupt turn for the trampoline-bouncing ""Happy."" She glides through ""Crazy For You"" and ""Goodbye"" like she's on a long board, and closes out ""Each & Everyday"" with a strolling outro of sleigh-bell jingles and harmonies built for campfire sing-alongs.
But Best Coast's lazy hooks are best served in the gentle pop query ""Our Deal."" Cosentino's anxious voice soars atop lush harmonies and twinkling guitars, all trying to put her weary head at ease. Its delicacy captures lightning in a bottle like only a handful of Beach Boys songs, and its latent awareness hits Crazy For You's M.O. directly on the head.
That M.O. is pretty simple. She confines her scope of love to the two primary emotions thrust upon pop culture's boy-girl conundrum: yearning and confusion. Her songs don't seem all that therapeutic, either—that's what the weed is for—and many of them never venture beyond insecure brooding. She whines over and over again about loneliness and boredom, conceding defeat without taking a proactive stance to remedy her loneliness. Nearly 7,000 people follow her Twitter feed, and I can think of at least one who wouldn't mind spending a day with her at the zoo. All she'd have to do is ask.
But for all the frustrating ambiguity and indecision in Cosentino's presentation, Crazy For You is extremely matter-of-fact. You can usually count the number of power chords in a song on one hand, and Cosentino consistently tries to string together elementary-grade rhymes like ""very end,"" ""boyfriend"" and ""just a friend"" in cookie cutter-clean confessionals. She sounds exhausted and tired of dressing up—language or otherwise—only to be let down again. Instead, she dials back her message until she turns apathetic lulls about smoking weed and watching TV into hand-clapping celebrations of social stagnance. She romanticizes despair, and there's something very non-elementary about that.
In her lyrics, Cosentino constantly tries to tackle mature subjects in a pre-pubescent manner, but the irony is that she isn't actually that ignorant. There's something to be said for knowing your limits, and Cosentino is smart not to aim out of her league. Crazy For You finds a comfortable niche in the pop canon, sits back and waits for others to crowd around it. Call it pity, but pity never had album art as endearing as this. The point is, despite all the opaque cues and seemingly uninformed deliveries that suggest otherwise, Cosentino knows exactly what she's doing: She's writing some of the most pitch-perfect pop songs around.
