Best Coast Interview - The Red Alert
The conversations I’m seeing in my RSS reader about the Best Coast album today are so far off from my own thoughts on the album I don’t know where to begin. This quote, I think, gets at what I imagine (or, at least, what the marketing has led me to believe) would be the ideal listening circumstances: out of your mind on a beach making out with someone you love. It’s certainly possible, of course, that those are also the ideal listening circumstances for Ashlee Simpson or Taylor Swift or whatever, but you’d have to convince me.
Put simply, the appeal of Best Coast over, say, Taylor Swift is not that one is more complex or mature than the other (I’d imagine people with greater maturity have had their fingers on Swift’s songs and productions, if it matters, which it really doesn’t). It’s one of function. These records work in different ways, at least right now— who knows what future perspective will do to all this. One is more literal, storytelling and lyric-driven, and the other is based more around a strong voice and a strong sense of mood.
(via desnoise)
Yes, this is all fair comment! The conversation spun out of the specific comments in Larry F’s review about lyrics (which are sung clearly and mixed high so I noticed them in a way I didn’t for, say, School Of Seven Bells) But certainly in my last post I was using that as shorthand for a broader similarity which maybe only I can hear! But the “strong mood” in Best Coast sounded like longing to me, which I also hear a lot of in teenpop, and in my experience longing under the influence of different substances is still longing. Anyway this is sort of what I meant by “wrong target market” in my original post so I’ll stop now.
