L.A. native sings the praises of her hometown in Best Coast
By Devon McReynolds
Feb. 4, 2010 9:02 p.m.
Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast had to brave a winter in the Big Apple to realize that her heart belonged to the City of Angels. “I missed the weather, the nature, the mountains, the beach,” Cosentino said. “I missed being able to get into my car and just drive and listen to music and sing at the top of my lungs. … I missed really small things, like the palm trees.”
Cosentino left noise duo Pocahaunted to attend the New School in New York City to study creative writing, journalism and literature. When she got there, she found that for her, the city was not conducive to making music, with skyscraper-high rents for practice spaces and the hassle of moving instruments and equipment around Manhattan. Although she was dying to get out of the city she had grown up in, the things she was sick of about Los Angeles were actually the things she missed the most. After she moved back, it didn’t take long for Cosentino to be creatively inspired by her new, old surroundings.
“Pretty much the second day I moved back, and I was living in this weird room at my mom’s house, I started writing songs,” Cosentino said. “And I was like, “˜Wait, why don’t I just start playing music again?'”
She got together with her friend Bobb Bruno, who she’d met through mutual friends they had in the Los Angeles band Mika Miko, and who occasionally played and recorded with Pocahaunted, and enlisted him in recording and creative collaboration. In the few months since its creation, Best Coast has already released a total of five 7-inch EPs, with another one coming out Feb. 10. They just finished recording a full-length album, which will come out later this year.
This love for the city and its laid-back Southern California lifestyle is apparent in the good vibrations of the music, but it’s far from a Beach Boys rip-off. Instead, she combines her love for surf music and girl groups from the 1960s with garage- and punk-influenced distorted guitar and simple power chords: To put it mathematically, it’s the Ronettes plus the Ramones divided by sunshine and longing.
“I just think it’s simple pop,” Cosentino said. “Not Taylor Swift pop music, but how it was in the ’60s when it was guitar, drum and bass and tambourine and hand claps.”
An example of this combination is her version of The Beach Boys’ “In My Room,” off the “Make You Mine” 7-inch EP, originally a gentle multi-harmonied ode to solitude. But Cosentino wrote her own melodies and fuzzed it out.
“I started singing it to the chords I was playing it with and I thought since I’m doing this in my bedroom, I’m going to do this song and make it my own and borrow the lyrics,” said Cosentino.
Her room is also where the bulk of the creative process takes place. Cosentino writes all the songs and records vocals and guitars on her computer, sends about 10 demo tracks over to Bruno and tells him the vibe she’s going for. Bruno contributes additional instrumentation and gives Cosentino production suggestions, like doubling vocals or adding other layers. He also plays guitar and bass for Best Coast’s live shows.
“Being just the two of us, we communicate really well, and we don’t even have to talk about things all the time,” Bruno said. “I like her songs and she likes what I do, so we can go off … and do our own things.”
It hasn’t taken long for Best Coast to catch on within the Los Angeles DIY scene, or outside of it. Spencer Dunham, a fourth-year environmental systems and society student, is also in a Los Angeles-based surf rock band, the Allah Las, and met Cosentino several months ago through mutual friends. He first saw Best Coast perform at a “California Girls Luau”-themed night with other Los Angeles girl bands Pearl Harbor and Neverever at now-defunct Territory Barbecue. “At that show, everyone there had kind of heard their stuff and it was good, but there were maybe 15 or 20 people there,” Dunham said. “And then I just saw her last week at a Paper Magazine party with a couple thousand people.”
Dunham, who grew up in Manhattan Beach, said that Cosentino’s beachy Southern California sound is easy for him to relate to.
“I think it’s easy for a lot of people to relate to across the country, because everyone wants to be a part of it,” Dunham said. “That’s why the Beach Boys are so popular.”
Cosentino is surprised by her recent upsurge of exposure, too. Aside from the sheer numbers picking up at live shows, British teen soap “Skins” used her song “When I’m With You” in their promotional commercials.
“There are certain times when it’s … like, whoa, this is weird,” Cosentino said. “I started this band two days after I dropped out of college.”
