Today's Music Pick: Best Coast

 

Yesterday while searching through Spotify I discovered the band Best Coast. Their sound is rather addictive and I've been playing their stuff over and over. 

Here is some history:

Best Coast is an American rock duo formed in Los Angeles, California in 2009. The band consists of songwriter, guitarist and vocalist Bethany Cosentino and guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Bobb Bruno. Cosentino, a former child actress, began writing music as a teenager and was formerly a member of the experimentalist drone group Pocahaunted. After a brief tenure at college in New York City, Cosentino returned to the West Coast and began recording lo-fi demos with Bruno, whom she met in the Los Angeles music scene. 

Discover the songs of Best Coast at Best Coast Mixtape

 After a string of 7-inch and cassette-only singles, the band signed to Mexican Summer, who issued the band's debut, Crazy for You, in 2010. Crazy for You became an unexpected commercial success following Internet buzz surrounding the duo. Lewis Pesacov of Fool's Gold and Foreign Born produced, engineered and mixed the album. Best Coast added a touring drummer, Ali Koehler of Vivian Girls, and spent much of 2011 on the road for festival appearances and tour dates. Best Coast's sophomore effort, The Only Place, was released in 2012 and featured a cleaner sound than their previous releases. In 2013, the duo released an EP, Fade Away, and their third studio album, California Nights, was released in May 2015. More recently, Best Coast released their fourth studio album, Always Tomorrow, in February 2020.

   

 Best Coast was originally loosely inspired by The Beatles and The Beach Boys, as well as straightforward 1950s/1960s pop music. The band's music was described by The Guardian as "like a lo-fi 60s garage rock and surfing band fronted by a girl group singer". "Drawing inspiration from '60s surf rock and girl groups, Best Coast's noisy lo-fi sound gave a nod to contemporaneous acts like Hot Lava, the Vivian Girls, and Brilliant Colors," wrote Margaret Reges of Allmusic. Weezer and Blink-182 partially inspired Cosentino's songwriting, and Best Coast have covered the Blink-182 song "Dammit" in concert. Pitchfork Media writes that "Best Coast carry enough influence from 90s California pop punk that they would've been right at home on a late-90s Warped Tour stage." Some genres they have been tagged as includes indie pop, surf/surf pop, indie rock, alternative rock,power pop, noise pop, garage rock and jangle pop.