Nobody outside of southern California ever mythologizes the Golden State in any other season besides summer. Nobody ever reminisces about warm California winters or scenic Los Angeles autumns. When it comes to California, and especially southern California, it's all about the summer. And when it comes to musicians, there is nobody else on the planet that is capturing the carefree solacement of summer any better than southern California's own sun-soaked one-two punch (and an apparent item) of Best Coast and Wavves.
Best Coast, made up of dueling guitars that are as reverb-soaked as they are sun-soaked, releases their debut album, Crazy For You, on July 27 on Mexican Summer. Frontwoman Bethany Cosentino's lively yet lovelorn vocals compliment the lyrics, which have a recurring theme of regret regarding past boyfriends, getting stoned, or a combination of the two. The album, an absolutely refreshing cool breeze of an album throughout, is at its finest when Bethany and company get liberal with multiple tempos within the same song. For example, the first two thirds of album highlight "I Want To" features a Phil Spector stomp beat while Bethany's line "I want you so much" soars over it; and that eventually morphs into a Live Through This-style punk jam, with Cosentino's gorgeous harmonies instead of a Courtney Love snarl. Another great example of this changing of dynamics is found in the breezy bonus track "When I'm With You":
Wavves, originally from San Diego, is unfortunately currently best known for primary member Nathan Williams's apparent drug-fueled meltdown at the 2009 Primavera Sound Festival, which eventually resulted in a fight in Brooklyn with Black Lips' Jared Swilley (victory for Williams, as Swilley left the fight a bloodied homophobe). Since then, Wavves have bounced back with Jay Reatard's former backing band, Bethany Cosentino on his arm, and a solid new album, King of the Beach. The whole album has an 'Animal Collective goes to the Warped Tour' sound going on, with electric guitars hooked up to distortion pedals that could have stolen from some terrible pop punk band's tour van and put to better use, while also including some psychedelic sound manipulation and trickery (best heard on the vaguely Zen chant vocal melody of "Idiot" and fuzzed-out guitar over ever-present piano chords of "Mickey Mouse"). Have a listen to "Idiot" right here:
So there you have it. Nothing says music royalty like two artists releasing two excellent albums in close succession to each other, apparently dating, and, hey, let's throw in shit-talking Katy Perry while we're at it:
Couldn't agree with her more. Best Coast and Wavves are the King and Queen of California, if not all of indie rock itself.
If you haven't noticed already Best Coast (and Wavves too) has a very entertaining Twitter account. Click HERE for Best Coast's and HERE for Wavves'. And don't forget to add For Young Moderns' Twitter account HERE if you haven't already.
(On a side note, Google Chrome, which I'm using as the web browser while writing this article up, says 'Frontwoman' is a misspelled word while 'Frontman' is not. That's kind of fucked up.)
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