Best Coast's The Only Place

        Best Coast is the West Coast Ramones with a Josephine instead of a Joey. It’s really really true. Best Coast capitalizes on the same musical and lyrical strengths that made the Ramones so timelessly kick butt-able, namely a hyperbolic use of minimalism. An analysis of Ramones lyrics reveal keen interests in girls, drugs, and doing nothing in New York City for incredibly long stretches of time. Likewise, Bethany Cosentino appears patriotically devoted to boys, pot, and “fun-fun-fun” in the California sun. And in the same way that Johnny Ramone found an angst-driven guitar mode that shaped the Ramones unmistakable feverish sound, Best Coast’s Bobb Bruno seems to have found his pickadilly niche somewhere between alt country and surf rock, slithering whiskey rhythms through a mai tai lazy haze.

            So when you boil it down, I love Best Coast because I love the Ramones. And, surely, I just won hell-points on someone’s uncool list for that statement.

            Best Coast’s sophomore release, The Only Place, progresses the band leagues ahead of their self-titled debut. While the music feels familiar and seminally Best Coast, better production and more sophisticated song-crafting exalt everything in Best Coast’s sound. On The Only Place, Bruno’s guitar swirls rather than fuzzes, and, while he still doesn’t wang out bridges or solos, Bruno feels more intentional with his craft, no longer depending on walls of static to build a two-and-a-half-minute-plus structure of laxidasical pop. And where the vocals took the backseat on Best Coast’s debut, echoing as if sheepishly recorded down a hall from the main studio, Consentino is now front and center, shining clean and confident on each track. In spite of all this newness, however, lyrics still feel repetitive to the point of anthem or despair, given your state of mind or esteem, or (let’s be honest) ether.

Even so, The Only Place is a yearning, hungry, barren but hopeful – dare I say, pretty – record. I’ve had The Only Place on repeat for four days solid, and I can say with all certainty that it’s not the kind of record that would make The Jerk’s Navin R. Johnson dance around the room and “want to be somebody.” In fact, The Only Place has the opposite effect. It’s a musical vacation, an auditory veg out, moving at the pace of LA traffic rather than LA ambition. Stand out tracks like “How They Want Me To Be” and “Up All Night” demand blank-brain window gazing, while the more upbeat “The Only Place” (a love song to California), “Let’s Go Home” and “Do You Love Me Like You Used To” inspire introspection more than action.

Like the Ramones, Best Coast thrives on wanting. On pining. On dissatisfaction. Thus, the lyrical, swirling repetition. Thus, the material obsession. Just ask Joey and Johnny: whether girls or boys, glue or pot, Rockaway or L.A., the need for something more than right here and right now exists. We’re not as autonomous as we’d like to believe. We need our homes. Our friends. Our partners. Even our substances. All reminding us that right now is not perfect. It will never be. So there’s art. And there’s hunger. Enough art and hunger, even in two distinctly similar and different bands, for too many records and too many songs to never reach the end of either. So it goes until we arrive at or evolve to something better.