Most of us have never been to California. It’s a long, long way away, across an ocean and a continent, and some of us may never even get there. Chances are you know what it sounds like, though. We’ve all heard that famous west coast sound; we’ve all seen the way the light reflects off the deep blue Pacific in a hundred thousand Hollywood pictures. We can picture the sparkling sands of Long Beach; we drive down the Sunset Strip in our minds every time L.A. Woman comes on the radio.
The Beach Boys sang about the girls and the surfin’. The Doors sang about their Los Angeles, the city of night. Crosby, Stills and Nash had more than a couple of songs about getting back to a simple life by the sea. Best Coast might simply be another band cashing in on living in the sunshine state, if they weren’t so completely and earnestly in love with their home.
You need only look to their debut, Crazy For You, to see how they first won the west coast. Now The Only Place sees her music expressing a more immersive and mature affection than the lo-fi love letters of Boyfriend and I Want To. It breathes and it springs with a palpable vitality – just the sort of thing to shake your hips to at a radio-equipped picnic in the sun. Think Byrdsy jangle riffs and yearning word pictures of mountains and birds and trees and restless, endless blue on the horizon. You won’t be far off the mark.
Cosetino and her guitar compadre Bobb Bruno have clearly been studying their early ‘60s dance bands. There’s so much of that happy-go-lucky sense of fun you get from the likes of the the Surfaris or the Bobby Fuller Four, you can almost see yourself perched on the warm rocky cliffs of Big Sur, or dangling your feet from a San Francisco rooftop, looking out to sea, wondering the same thing as this summery young woman: “Why would you live anywhere else?”
Good question, Beth Cosetino. Good question.