Crazy for You

Consentino's certainly got an ear for a hook, and her trio makes good use of them, but you can only sing about your cat, weed, and loneliness for so many songs.

Though Best Coast's music is fairly sunny-like beach music for kids who reek of patchouli-Crazy For You contains a core of sadness mixed with sickness that's difficult to embrace.

The good news is, this album is going to garner a dozen swoons in her direction for each romantic woe she professes on it.

From the vogueish cat on their album cover to the deliberate non-production, Crazy For You comes wrapped in a hipster cloak, but Cosentino is no slacker. [Sep 2010, p.98]

Too often, bands are promenaded across the web, heralded in a way that makes everyone a name-dropping music connosieur, only to fade too fast....hopefully the same won't happen to the latest interwebs It Chick, Bethany Cosentino b.k.a. Best Coast.

Dolorous, soulful, a voice that speaks of total commitment--Best Coast are The Crystals of the blogosphere. [Sep 2010, p.90]

Her lyrics are a tricky thing-their literalism is both their greatest strength and a crippling weakness.

There's a musical and rhythmic uniformity among these 13 tracks that might lose ears beyond the album's brisk 29 minutes, but it reflects a consistent summer ambivalence to which most anyone can relate.

Mainly, Crazy for You manages to reference weed without being lowbrow and her cat without being twee. Sun-drenched guitar licks go woozy and Cosentino's crystal clear vocals lament and wish and hope. You don't have to be West Coast-born to feel the weight of an "I miss you so much" chorus and a slow drum beat.

Missing the debased lo-fi fuzz of its previous 7-inches, Best Coast's first LP is still a clear good vibration in complication amour, resonating through hot, stoned days of West Coast love and lonely, sleepless nights of unanswered phone calls.

What's the same is bigger and broader, bringing its faults into stark relief. This is, I stress, Best Coast's Proper Album, and so rather than Where The Boys Are's loosely defined "songs" we get Songs: feeble, noise-soaked throw-back translations of everything from doo-wop, girl-group, pop-punk, to pseudo-grunge.

Crazy For You may not break much new ground, but it's a fine record that fits nicely into the escapist beach pop melieu presently ranging in indie rock. [Summer 2010, p.77]

Crazy for You is meant to be an album that creates a mood, a feeling of gentle despair and wistful longing that grows with each song. On that count, it's a complete success.

Best Coast's music wishes for that innocence – for when a pop song could sum up your whole torment in three perfect minutes, before your heart truly gets broken that first time – and successfully evokes it with Crazy for You's immediate classic-pop hits.

If whining and wishing that your cat could talk is your bag, well, here's Best Coast. Now let's get burritos.

The songs are so good they can disarm any skeptics.

Behold, here arrives the first "star" from a productive lo-fi music scene. That's because she's the first out of the bunch of heavily-blogged artists to display her personality, to prove to the world that she's got something to say. And boy has she said it.

It's weirdly powerful stuff this, couch-rock, heartbreak coated in cereal. And with this limelight-stealing album Best Coast are providing an amazing advert for dropping out, having mad crushes and doing very little other than getting high.

Crazy is the soundtrack of being young, in love and in the sun.

This record is carefree and instantly likable--even if it doesn't seem to care what you think of it.

You might think you've already heard much of what Best Coast has to offer, but Crazy for You shows there's always a novel way to tell an old story.

The album is filled with well-conceived, well-executed pop pieces, but it would be silly to pretend that the musical landscape, including Top 40, isn't occupied by songwriters who make reasonably innocent songs about boys at least as well as Best Coast does.

It's catchy and pleasure-packed, even if the smartass, lovelorn lyrics never get much deeper than "Want to kill you but then I'd miss you."

Crazy for You is a soundtrack to bikini season as it's actually experienced, racked by impossible expectations and as high as the tide line.

It's a take it or leave it sort of deal and though I presume that is exactly how it's going to be received among most listeners, there's a fan base here for any romantic fuzz-nerd with a sweet tooth, which considering the success of the inferior Dum Dum and Vivian Girls (of which one plays in Best Coast's live band (with all due respect)) is quite an audience indeed.

It's all set to dreamy poppets of tom-tom heavy, hazy pop that rarely last more than two-minutes-30. A charming introduction.

Without scaling any great heights, it's a sweetly engaging mix of lo-fi indie-rock and '60s girl group innocence. [Sep 2010, p.122]