Best Coast

Nowadays, you can’t swing your saddle bag around without hitting someone that’s in a garage band taking cues from first-generation indie-pop groups and the ’60s girl groups that those indie-poppers learned from. One of the things that separates Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino from this ever-burgeoning pack is her pedigree—before she started working on her harmonies and her “Be My Baby” nods, she was one-half of aptly-titled drone merchants Pocahaunted. It doesn’t seem like the easiest change to make, switching from such ominous and evocative sounds to crowd-pleasing sing-along pop. If Best Coast’s slowly growing discography is any indication, though, Consentino’s move was the right one.

This leads to the other thing that lets Best Coast stand out from her peers: the quality of the songs. Though she covers her songs up in the same lo-fi shroud that other groups sometimes use to disguise their weaknesses, the sing-songy melodies that Cosentino unspools, coupled with her affable singing voice, easily cut through the static. More importantly, when Best Coast opts to make themselves heard (as on recent A-Side, “When I’m With You”), Consentino is revealed to be something of a pre-Capitol Liz Phair sound-alike, and not just in the way she sings. In her songs, Consentino sounds like the sort of woman that wants someone to bore her or piss her off so she can write a vulnerable but withering tune (with a fair helping of some ooh-la-las and ba-ba-bas). In a realm full of copycats and cats that are Xeroxing those copies, Best Coast shows that it’s not just knowing who to emulate, but how you emulate them. —David Raposa