Best Coast - Always Tomorrow

The Guardian 80

Concord Music
The duo show why they’ve outlasted their beach-bum peers with a delightful study of reinvention and contentment

Best Coast emerged in 2010 as the faces of a California slacker wave that evangelised cats, weed, guitar and the beach, and not a great deal more – an enviable lifestyle that enchanted fans and chimed with a generation’s post-recession hopelessness, though its burnout was inevitable. Sure enough, Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno’s peers vanished, and their scene’s louche allure was surpassed over the subsequent decade by entrepreneurialism, and later wellness.

Pitchfork 65

The band’s new LP is a rosily optimistic record that showcases Bethany Cosentino’s expanding range as a vocalist and songwriter.

The Guardian 60

(Concord)

“I didn’t want to write a song about you, yeah/ In case it was too good to be true” is a genius opening line to a song (True), with its multiple meanings and reflexive ironies. You can hear that Bethany Cosentino is proud of it, because she really drags out its delivery, almost to the point that its punchy brilliance is lost. What’s disappointing about Best Coast’s first album in five years is that not much else feels as shocking or powerfully true.

This is Cosentino’s first set of sobriety songs, but not enough of the shame or damage that must have attended her decision to give up drinking informs the duo’s politely executed indie rock. “If everything’s OK/ Then what the hell do I complain about?”, from the outstanding song Everything Has Changed, says it all. Written at one of Cosentino’s low ebbs, tormented by writer’s block and booze, it flags an issue that is wrestled with yet never resolved by this solid but unchallenging album. Great art doesn’t have to come from a place of great discomfort, but it often helps. Always Tomorrow always chooses cosseting its audience over confronting more painful truths.