Bethany Cosentino is 26 years old and watching the clock anxiously. On her band’s new mini-album, Fade Away, she’s often found monitoring the unsettling passage of time. “I don’t know who I am this year,” goes one song. “When did I wake up and suddenly my soul had grown so old?” she asks. “Last 30 seconds I’ll wait for him,” she sings, resigned and bitter. “You taught me that my heart would grow old.” And as if giving herself a pep talk to buffer the unease: “Life is short but so am I. What does it matter, anyway?” Over the span of three years and two full-lengths, Cosentino has achieved a rarefied sort of indie-rock success and its attendant stardom, but she’s still left asking the questions you ask once you realize adulthood is not the bed of enlightenment it’s advertised to be. What do I have to show for myself? Am I any smarter than I used to be? Why isn’t this getting easier? And literally: Who have I become?
Fade Away attempts to answer these questions in a single, satisfying way: by returning to the unmistakable elements that characterized Best Coast when they hatched during the fuzzy garage-pop boom a few years ago. She's back with propulsive melodies, a significant dose of reverb, repetition, and sticky, simple lyrics about aimlessness and the type of love that advances at a lackadaisical West Coast pace. The project is a return to form in the most literal of senses, too—it’s out on Cosentino’s new label, Jewel City, and at an unorthodox seven-song length, it has the scrappy, self-governed feel of her band’s early demos, albeit with a bit more polish. There are no name producers in the credits or songs that sound like jingles written for the Los Angeles Department of Tourism. Which is to say there’s nothing on Fade Away that would fit naturally on Best Coast’s slickly inert sophomore album, The Only Place, a record that boasted maturity but never really resonated.
But while it’s tempting to claim that Best Coast have reverted to a simple formula, or to think of Fade Away as an easy stopgap between The Only Place and the band’s next record, that’s not quite what’s happening, either. There are touches of sophistication across Fade Away that Best Coast haven’t been able to achieve until now, and Cosentino glides easily between shades of guitar-pop and chillier sounds. She seems as comfortable on a swooning ballad (“Fade Away”) as she does on a song that harnesses the frenetic sugar of Josie and the Pussycats (“This Lonely Morning”) or the gauzy whisper of Mazzy Star (“Baby I’m Crying”). She’s flexing her muscles as a songwriter, and she makes something that’s probably very difficult sound as though it comes easily to her.
The Cosentino who openly admits to struggle, or to not having figured it all out, then, is now relegated a familiar lyrical space. It can be easy to write her words off as too simplistic, too repetitive, or to dismiss them as retrograde in sentiment, but those qualities are what allow Best Coast to endure in a sea of acts with similar aesthetics. Cosentino is unafraid to fuss over the trivialities of plain old-fashioned love in a time when marriage has been described as the merging of brands. She’s ambivalent or confused about pretty much everything while everyone else’s tastes are codified to Likes. She has become reliably great at distilling a complex range of human emotion to basic sentences, and all of a sudden, the weed leaves and cats and cut-outs of the shape of California are merely kitschy insignias rather than overarching frameworks. "I won't change/ I'll stay the same," she sings on "I Wanna Know". While Cosentino is anxious to figure out who she’s become, Fade Away points to how strong she’s been all along.
