As Voltaire said, if a Best Coast album named California Nights didn’t exist, it would be necessary to create one. This is the band’s third LP, following the Fade Away mini-album that aborted the attempt at repositioning Bethany Cosentino as a stripped-down singer-songwriter, as on 2012's The Only Place. Instead, California Nights layers the fuzz back on top of her distinct voice for a radio-friendly take on '90s alt-rock—an attempt to stay part of the establishment as natural questions arise over the diminishing returns of the band’s core formula.
Much was initially made about Cosentino's penchant for pot, even as much of the music on Crazy for You sounded relentlessly sunny in ways that being stoned often is not. Here, the tone is thicker. Producer Wally Gagel also helmed Fade Away, and California Nights is a natural extension; there are the familiar reference points of surf rock and garage rock, and the band occasionally heads in heavier directions. The title track and "Feeling Ok" find a midpoint between shoegaze and Sheryl Crow, the strangled reverb of "Sun Was High (So Was I)" taken to its well-produced conclusion. When she sings "I stay high all the time just to get by" on the former, the music envelops her thoughts like a bad trip. Meanwhile, she’s added faint notes of sophistication: There’s what passes for a bridge on the aggressively catchy "Heaven Sent", which is only one line repeated a few times as the music drops in and out in classic pop-punk stop-time, but enough to change up the verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure so ardently followed on previous records.
California Nights is a professional album: heavy-ish, filled with hooks, somewhere between "fast enough to dance" and "slow enough to sigh to while looking out of a window." There’s nothing with the ubiquitous charm of Crazy for You—no "Boyfriend" or "Our Deal"—but Cosentino's voice is bright, clear, and full of emotive sentimentality. As a lyricist, she remains a devout student of what Lester Bangs dubbed the Lou Reed "I walked to the chair/ Then I sat in it" school of lyrics; she expresses herself clearly. The nadir comes during "So Unaware", when she literally sings "What is life?/ What is love?"—the core question of many works of art, true, but usually they're explored rather than just stated. As usual with Cosentino, you'll either be infuriated by the simplicity or endeared by its earnestness.
Anyways, it's not like "She loves you, yeah yeah yeah" is featured on any AP English exams. It's easier to be annoyed when Cosentino lapses into rote sentiments, especially since her voice seems so sure of its rightness. "Jealousy" is addressed to those amorphous "haters," the bane of any successful person's existence, and offers the deeply uncomplicated observation that "girls will be girls and boys will be boys/ It's just the way it is." A warning sign goes up when you consider Cosentino is no longer a broke-ish slacker sitting on the couch with her cat and her bong. She's achieved a level of success that allows her to appear in whiskey ads and design her own Urban Outfitters clothing line, while ignoring the obvious political implications. And why shouldn't she? Anyone with a problem is only a hater.
At times, it seems her insistence on affectless slackerism is less a genuine expression than a cynical pose, aimed at ensuring she stays part of the establishment. As Drake will tell you, there's a lot of money in being fashionably moody. And yet for all the formal or ideological complaints, Cosentino remains remarkably capable of riffing on heartbreak, and the concomitant yearning. On "When Will I Change", she sings openly about what some would see as her self-absorption: "It's not that bad, and I have no reason to be sad/ But I find a way almost every day to stay this way." Well, it’s honest. If this is what Best Coast continues to give us after six years and three albums, you can either shrug it off or let the vibes carry you away.
