I was talking about grandiosity yesterday, but if Titus Andronicus wanted to reach the sky, or rather the lack of, Best Coast who performed on the Oak stage before them, just wanted to reach her boyfriend’s hand, and she repeated it many many times.
Bethany Consentino, aka Best Coast, took the stage around 3:35 pm at the FYF fest, wearing a short black and white skirt, a hat, and large sunglasses, complaining about the heat, saying we would have to forgive her if she passes out. Come on! Yes, it was hot but at least Bethany, you had water!
She delivered a set of sun dripped songs, mostly from her ‘Crazy for you’ album, strumming her light blue electric guitar, with Bobb Bruno and Ali Koehler on drums backing her up.
Her band was recently declared best new act by NME, and if I can understand the attraction (she is cute and likable), the easy and simple 60’s injected melodies, her clear and harmonious voice, a little more high pitched than Jenny Lewis’ but close enough, the songs by themselves are light like the beach balls that were flying above our heads, yes I got it, it’s summery. But take a song like ‘I want to’, during almost 2 minutes she repeats ‘I want you so much, I miss you so much’ stretching the syllables forever, injecting a lot of aaaah, and ooooh, then she gets a little excited with her guitar, punks a little bit the slow tune and you have the song!
Live, all her short songs seemed unisonic, lazy boy-crazy tunes, which belong to the same minimalist and lo-fi universe of guitar driven songs and echoing vocals. Economical songs? Sure, she does not waste words: ‘The world is lazy/but you and me/we’re just crazy/So when I’m with you, I have fun’, she sang in ‘When I’m with you’, or ‘Last night I went out with this guy, this guy/he was nice, he was nice and cute/but he, he wasn’t you’ she harmonized in ‘The end’. More lines from high school texting than intricate lyrics, and I know a lot about high school text messaging.
If you listen to the album, her voice harmonizes with her own voice, echoing a grungy mix of the Everly Brothers or the Beach Boys in a female sort of way but also in a more boring sort of way (yeah she repeats a lot her lines). But live, it’s another story, each of her song she played, ‘Bratty B’, ‘Boyfriend’, ‘The end’, ‘I want to’, ‘Honey’, ‘Sun was high’, and ‘When I’m with you’ were much sloppier, the guitar more noisy, and the voice less distinctive, and this was a big loss because her voice is mostly what you hear on the album.
Listen to Best Coast performing her ‘Boyfriend’ song, the center subject of her album: