Alright, stop reading this pissy webpage and go to Best Coast’s MySpace. There is a song called ‘The Sun Was High (And So Was I)’. Listen to it. Do you get the immediate vertigo pop rush, the way this one note, two minute song coos at your heart and rattles your brainstem? All glorious girl group moments are here, buried in dusty, sunny fuzz by a stoned Californian woman. It’s artefact and total now, the best song you’ll hear whatever poxy day you click on it, and it’s transported me here, from Cardiff to the Louisiana on my own, to see if magic tricks work close up as well.
(We can probably discount sole support Siddy Bennett at this stage. Apologies to the two chuckling teenagers with acoustic guitars playing trust fund Joni Mitchell-lite. There’s no place for you in my fevered skewering of potentially deathless thrills. Nice shoes though.)
The best music operates in some sort of dreamland of fake reality, nudging you from the mundane and wobbling tits of joy in your face. The reality can’t cope, so it’s a slightly flat moment when Bethany Cosentino walks onstage, vaguley shy and normal. Ten bonus points though: she’s joined by a drummer the spit of the Vivian Girls’ stickswoman plus a rocking Japanese dude on second guitar. Zero bassist clutter. After some opening decency, ‘The Sun Was High…’ lands in second, strong and diffident, coasting on easy quality. This set may only fire out one more effortless doozy, the nagging chugfest ‘When I’m With You’, but there’s a whole lot of quiet consistency here. 90-second songs are rattled through, and if the live get up jettisons several layers of surface noise it also clears way for Cosentino’s songwriting nous to be revealed: classic girl/boy trips through happysad territory, music that shares the keep-it-simple sing outs of say, Dressy Bessy, just, you know, a bit cooler. There’s basically no variety and a semi-sad realisation that the home-recorded murk is half the fun with Best Coast but this evening still crushes enough demons to leave you happy, stranded alone on a train station, grinning at the sky.
