Now it’s Time to Show You that the West Coast Rocks: Totally Crushed Out vs. Best Coast
By Ryan Pangilinan

SoCal indie pop sensation, Best Coast, have seemingly come out of nowhere. After releasing some raw garage punk DIY demos, the band – comprised of singer/guitarist Bethany Cosentino, multi-instrumentalist Bobb Bruno and the newest Coaster, drummer Ali Koehler (formerly of the Vivian Girls) – dropped their debut long-player, “Crazy for You” (Mexican Summer), an homage to all things Californian.

Best Coast’s sound, a mishmash of surf, garage and good ol’ pop-punk, has afforded the band a sizable audience in a short amount of time, and their album has been a favorite at the Totally Crushed Out offices (and by offices, I mean mine and Michelle’s apartments) for a while now.

Recently, Cosentino talked to Totally Crushed Out about moving from the tin-can Beastie Boys-esque sound on their demo, as well as whether they get hassled about singing about ganja and love all the time.

Totally Crushed Out: Let’s start with the first question, which you might be a little tired of, but you were in Pocahaunted for a bit. How did you shift from that band to this project?

Cosentino: It’s started when I moved back from New York to LA, where I’m from, and I had this idea to start a band that was very surf/beach/sixties-inspired. I knew Bobb because we had worked together in a previous band, and knew him from just being this guy around town that everyone used to record and everyone had him play. He’s toured with crazy bands and opened for crazy bands. I just knew him as this awesome music dude and he was the only person I thought I could ask to get involved with me in this project because I knew I couldn’t do the entire solo project on my own, I don’t have the instrumental capability and Bobb is really good at that kind of stuff, so I just wrote to him…I emailed [songs] to him and we started recording and putting out stuff. It pretty much just all happened on its own and it was very strange. It was just an idea and it’s turned into something much bigger than I ever thought it would.

The band’s earlier material had a very raw sound and it relied heavily on vocal distortion, versus the new album, which has a clean sound. Was that a conscious decision when you went in to record the full-length?

Yeah, you know, we recorded the early stuff in Bobb’s bedroom. He had a studio in his house and we would churn out three or four songs a day. I’ve never really been a big fan of my own voice and my own vocals, so I said, “Let’s just put a lot of effects so you can’t tell what I sound like.” That’s the way I wanted to sound at that time. When we went into record “When I’m With You,” it was the first time we went into a real studio, it was the first time we had live drums, everything was sort of different. We had a producer, we had someone behind the editing board, as opposed to us being behind the editing board. We were there to just play the music and listen to it and give our ideas to the person actually recording. Louis, our producer, was like, “I really think your song is amazing and I really think you should tone down some of the effects because it’ll bring out the songwriting more or your voice.” I was like, “Eh, I don’t really know” and we tried it and it sounded great and I was like, “You’re right, I actually like this.”

We had only been a band for a year and a half, so we were still figuring out what we sounded like. I just don’t see the point in going into a studio and spending time and money in making a record and making it sound like you just recorded it in your bedroom. We wanted to have a record that sounded polished, but not too polished.

The songs definitely have a theme of romance, romance lost, which are padded by your personal interest in weed. Have you ever been hassled by anyone because of the content of your songs?

People talk, people say that it’s boring, “I don’t understand why she’s so sad.” It’s not to be taken as literal as people have taken it. Yes, I write a lot of the songs based on emotions that I’m feeling or emotions I’ve felt in the past, but it’s not 100 percent true. A lot of it is inspired by bands that inspire me. If you listen to a Beach Boys record or a Beatles record, a lot of them are about love. I think because I’m a woman in a band, people assume that I’m needy or I’m weird. I wanted the first record to be about one thing. The name of the record, the title, sums it up: Crazy for You. It’s a record about a person who was going crazy – not every song is about one person, not every song is 100 percent factual about my real life. I took emotions that I was feeling and emotions that I felt and put them into songs. I think that they’re very relatable. I think anyone can listen to a song about being dumped or a song about wishing the person you like likes you back… I’m a very big believer in telling it like it is.

It seems that there is a double standard because it’s not like anyone from Dance Hall Crashers ever got hassled for having songs with very similar lyrical content.

…I think it’s because I am the frontwoman of my band and I am very vocal about my opinions and I talk like a Valley Girl and I’m into things like Paramore and bad reality shows, people think “Oh, that girl is stupid” but it’s not like I’m hiding behind anything, I’m completely being myself and if people want to talk shit about my music because they don’t like me as a person, then that’s completely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter to me, anyways. I don’t pay attention to the negative things that people say. I don’t let them affect me.

“Crazy for You” has taken off. I couldn’t find the record here in stores the first few weeks that it was out. How have the shows been for the last few tours?

We haven’t played a proper show in the States, with our record being out, yet. We played a show in Chicago before Pitchfork, a pre-Pitchfork show, or whatever and the record wasn’t out yet, but it had leaked and every kid at the show was singing along. I didn’t fucking care that the record leaked, it’s gonna leak, that’s what happens. People download them and people buy them, it doesn’t matter.

But now that we have a record out, I can only imagine that this tour is going to be a lot of fun. People might be more engaging and will sing along more. When we did an East Coast-only tour, we were like “Oh this is from the record,” but we didn’t know when it was coming out, we didn’t even have a label yet. It was like this mysterious thing…we didn’t know what the fuck what was going on. But now we have a proper label, a proper record and merchandise to sell on tour, I can imagine it’ll be a lot of fun and a lot easier on all of us. It sucked when we were touring and all we had were seven inches and they were all sold out. “Sorry all we have are mix CDs that we burned to sell at our shows.” (Laughs) It was just very strange. The tour will feel a little bit more professional, I guess, I don’t know. It’ll just be a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to seeing how people react to the record and you can always tell by the people that go to the shows, so we’ll see how that goes.

“Crazy for You” is out now on Mexican Summer Records; the band’s US tour begins on September 4th in LA. Keep abreast of all things Best Coast on their blog.