Best Coast - Crazy For You (2010) [Mexican Summer] // Grade: B+

It’s probably a coincidence, isn’t it, how easily things with crazy in the title seem to invade pop culture: Heart’s “Crazy On You”, Madonna’s “Crazy For You”, Patsy Cline and Gnarls Barkley’s respective “Crazy”, Ozzy’s “Crazy Train”. And Crazy Horse, of course, plus that mid-90s Aerosmith jam with the video equal parts kinda cool and super creepy. Best Coast’s invasive debut fits in there somewhere—jammed between Cline, maybe, and Liv Tyler stripping to her dad’s single—but mostly as a point of provocation: when people talk about Bethany Cosentino, they talk as often about the shit she tweets and the boys she dates as they do, you know, her songs.

But they’re good songs. We should talk about them, and not just in the context of Wavves and Vivian Girls and whatever else summery, reverbed, retro lo-fi et cetera et cetera. Ex-Pocahaunted Cosentino and her musical partner Bobb Bruno factor into all that for sure, but they do it with distinction; Crazy For You feels like a modern Juliana Hatfield, our latest Liz Phair—this golden-voiced, California-obsessed girl writing simple songs with simple lyrics about love’s most desperate moments (and cats and pot too, but only as they relate to said desperation). It’s a bittersweet album, saccharine at times and very much un-ironic; when Cosentino sings “pick up the phone/I wanna talk/about my day/it really sucked”, she doesn’t do it with a knowing wink, some post-Springsteen in-joke. She means: Today blew. This is my reality. Pick up the fucking phone.

And if Crazy For You gets shoved into a corner of ironic sentiment, well…alright. Whatever. But to dismiss it as only that would be throw Exile in Guyville or Hey Babe out with the bathwater; Cosentino, both on and off stage, is ultimately saying more about our modern lives than even I care to admit. Today sucked. Pick up the phone. Combine that sort of relatable simplicity with an album’s worth of jangly guitars and beachy, surfy, catchy melody, and you’ve crammed yourself into the pop-cultural fray. Exactly where Crazy For You is and hopefully stays—at least for a little while longer.

- Rue Sauvage