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Friday 6th April 2012
All Day BBQ Festival

Sparrow and the Workshop
6 Day Riot
The Nuns
Singing Adams
Y Niwl
Colours
Dignan Porch
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The Windmill
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On Our iPod

Golden Grrrls - New Pop 7”

Chris Devotion & The Expectations - Amalgamation & Capital (album)

Trailer Trash Tracys - Ester (album)

Throwing Up - Mother Knows Best 7”

Howling Wolf - Complete Chess Masters 1951-60

The Ketamines - A Rotten Bond/1 Yr (from Oddbox Singles Club Pt 2)

Cardinal - Hymns (album)

Proper Ornaments - Taking the Gamble Out of Buying 12”

Darren Hayman - January Songs (album)

Various: Marshall Teller EP 12”

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Album Review

Best Coast
Best Coast Wichita

Article written by Ged M - Aug 23, 2010

Best Coast

Bethany Cosantino’s excellent singles have created a blog-steria that will gain extra fuel from this album and I wouldn’t bet against her being accompanied by Jools Holland by the time of his Hogmanay Hootenanny show. The sound of the record is a lot cleaner and more pop than the scuzzy lo-fi of most of the 7”s – none of which appear on the album, although you can get a free CD of the ‘Something In The Way’ single if you buy the album at certain indie shops – but it’s still ultra-catchy Cali-pop, with its 60s girlpop echoes and dripping with harmony and reverb.

Musically, it’s a constant thrill, cramming time-changes, urgent pop rhythms and tons of melody into each song, though it’s not quite accomplished lyrically. The album’s themes are essentially:

Boys (how to get/ how to keep): 99%
The summer sun, smoking weed, her cat: the rest.

All the songs are about her being happy or heartbroken, and at times they become so minimalist it’s like some sort of Japanese poetry; ‘I Want To’ consists of just three lines repeated in just under 3 minutes. And when she’s not missing boys, she’s in need of her cat, or marijuana, or the summer. Yet given her workrate, you’d never dismiss this as sun/weed-baked slacker pop – it’s track after track of kinetic surf and garage pop, 13 of them in just 31 minutes. Two of the most engaging songs are the ones that actually have the best lyrics; ‘Honey’ is dark and threatening while the radio-friendly ‘Boyfriend’ makes unfavourable comparisons with her intended’s current squeeze: “she’s prettier and skinnier/ she has a college degree/ I got done when I was 17”. But she’s smarter than she writes and, just like the Ramones could compose fantastic dumb pop, so all the wanting and missing and hoping adds up to a fantastic pop debut, admittedly one that’s likely to take her out of the indie orbit before long.

Links:
http://www.wichita-recordings.com/index.php/artists/detail/best_coast/
http://www.myspace.com/bestycoasty