Ten Great Albums From 2015, #3: Best Coast California Nights (Harvest)
Some albums are born to be summertime albums; music that not only takes on the aura of the hot season, but entrenches itself into your psyche as your own personal soundtrack. After years of repeated listens, no matter when or where you hear the songs again, you’ll always be transported back to that sunny season your spent soaking them in. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours has always been one of those albums for me. Playing on the street as a child, I recall it wafting out into the post-thunderstorm air from open house windows trying to catch a cool breeze. From the opening notes of Best Coast’s 3rd full-length, I had a hunch that it was ready to join the canon of essential summertime listening.
But hunches alone don’t qualify you for such exclusive company. I had to road-test this album with the windows down, blare it at cookouts, and escape the sun in the cool, dark recesses of my man cave with it. I’m happy to report such exhaustive research confirmed my initial hunch again and again: this one is a keeper.
“California nights/Make me feel so happy I could die…” Bethany Cosentino sings on the album’s loping title track. And I get it. I spent four strange years in the Los Angeles area, and there IS something magic about the nights. In fact, if it had just been one long series of nights, I’d likely still be there. It was those California days that wore me down: spending an hour in the car to go nine miles, getting my car towed from in front of my own house, paying $12 for a hamburger…it just clashed with the small-town upbringing I’d just left. Many days when I left my LA office, I’d quickly burn a mix CD of songs I could sing along with to get me home on the hour-plus commute down the 405 (singing in the car to this day still alleviates my rush hour anguish). Had this album existed during my SoCal tenure, when I could have rocked it on the way home, I’d wager Best Coast could have changed my mind about embracing the City of Angels. As a band, they celebrate their locale with the same kind of homegrown pride Van Halen exuded in 1978 or the Go-Gos a few years later. I envy any artist proud enough of their origins to celebrate it so loudly. As you might expect, this album sounds even better in the midst of its inspiration; I road tested it in Los Angeles during a recent visit and it feels as natural as the marine layer on your skin.
The one knock I’ve read more than once about this album is that the tracks have a number of similar sounds (I believe Rolling Stone used the word “same-y”), but that’s unfair. As I’m wont to say, this album has a remarkable Teflon quality; the level of re-playability and satisfaction is really high. Had it been released in the days when everyone had an auto-reverse cassette in their car, this would have been one of those tapes where it didn’t matter which side you put it in on; each track is strong, and it works as an album because in the midst of enjoying on track, you find yourself happily anticipating the next. That’s not easy. (Although for the record, I’ll earmark “Wasted Time” and “Heaven Sent” as my current highlights). If they err on the side of monochrome, they picked a beautiful color to do so.
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