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At Their Best? Not So Much
Review of Best Coast’s show at the South Street Seaport
Photo: Greg Chow, via Flickr
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If you’re in a band that has lines like, “You drive me crazy, but I love you/You make me lazy, but I love you,” you have to have some charisma to pull it off. And Best Coast affects a wonderfully-stoned-in-the-SoCal-sunlight kind of indiepop on their EPs and album Crazy for You, so lyrics like that, when coming through computer speakers, sound pretty charming. But on July 23, when the three-piece played at South Street Seaport to a crowd of some 500 people, they were muted and boring, like watching a magic trick when you already know how it’s done.
To be fair, the day was disgusting and humid. Bethany Cosentino, the 23-year-old frontwoman, Tweeted earlier that day “Heat makes me bitchy” and “I’ve been in new York for too fucking long” [sic]. And guess what, it showed. Cosentino played most of her songs by rote. Attention to detail, like the punchy iambs in the chorus for “Boyfriend,” was gone. They sounded as thin as a high school basement band. Bobb Bruno, who co-writes some of the songs and plays guitar, was anonymous on stage, even though his production on Crazy practically begs you to compare him to Phil Spector. And Ali Koehler, who left Vivian Girls to play with this band, played about as well as someone who played drums for Vivian Girls.
But the bigger problem is that, without any winking, girlish appeal, their songs are just downers. I knew that most of them were about loneliness and rejection, but that was forgivable when you could sashay to it. The only song that had life to it was the penultimate one, “When I’m With You.” The best part of that song is when Cosantino belts, “My mama always told me there’d be boys like you.” At the Seaport, she nailed it. Girls started jumping around, indie bros threw their fists in the air. It was that little bit of magic that made the whole show worth the humidity. They just need to figure out how to do it even if the heat makes them bitchy.
Kevin Dugan is the co-founder and managing editor of Armchair/Shotgun. You should follow him on Twitter, especially if you share his fondness for bagels and/or New Jersey.