“Hopefully people are making out to Best Coast in their cars or something. Or are smoking weed in their cars listening to it.”—Best Coast Interview - The Red Alert
The conversations I’m seeing in my RSS reader about the Best Coast album today are so far off from my own thoughts on the album I don’t know where to begin. This quote, I think, gets at what I imagine (or, at least, what the marketing has led me to believe) would be the ideal listening circumstances: out of your mind on a beach making out with someone you love. It’s certainly possible, of course, that those are also the ideal listening circumstances for Ashlee Simpson or Taylor Swift or whatever, but you’d have to convince me.
Put simply, the appeal of Best Coast over, say, Taylor Swift is not that one is more complex or mature than the other (I’d imagine people with greater maturity have had their fingers on Swift’s songs and productions, if it matters, which it really doesn’t). It’s one of function. These records work in different ways, at least right now— who knows what future perspective will do to all this. One is more literal, storytelling and lyric-driven, and the other is based more around a strong voice and a strong sense of mood.
You could quibble over whether Swift’s songs work better than Best Coast’s songs in literal, storytelling, lyric-driven terms, but you’d be comparing apples to oranges, much as I would be if I complained that Swift’s recordings aren’t hazy and beach-friendly enough or her voice Neko Case-ish enough.
EDIT: Then again this all reminds me of when Wire magazine recently said White Hinterland’s new album is not r&b, but rather is suited for contemplating snowcapped mountains, or something like that. Um, so is THAT what the kids are calling it now?
Best Coast’s Function In My Life: Listening to it while grilling with Joe a couple nights after he was out of town for two days, being so happy he was back and wondering how I went from being a girl who lived alone with no problem to being a girl who gets creeped out by old-apartment-noises and becomes incredibly sad to not have her boyfriend home for a few days, and then eating kebabs.
