Best Coast’s ‘Always Tomorrow’ is a quiet reckoning. Here Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno weigh their own longevity, personal changes and botched relationships against songs that offer minor revisions to their slacker-rock sound. When they hit their marks, they transmute a potential bummer into a complete blast.
Take, for example, the single Everything Has Changed. A glorious slab of power chords that recalls Bleach’s similarly engaging Wednesday Night Melody, it finds Cosentino reviewing alterations to her lifestyle and circumstances that add up to a giddy refrain: “Everything has changed, I like it this way.” One listen and you won’t be able to read that last word without extending it across multiple syllables.
Next up, For The First Time shines a light on the songwriting smarts that have helped Best Coast outlive many of the sun-kissed loser-rock bands they came up alongside. It’s essentially Fleetwood Mac’s Everywhere dressed in turned-up Levi’s and ripped Vans. That, it turns out, is a really good thing.
Cosentino’s personal revelations—often stemming from her sobriety and a winking acknowledgement that we’re all slowly dying—are couched in familiar, relatable terms. “I am the same way that I used to be,” she sings on Rollercoaster. “Took away substances, that’s the only change I see.”
Elsewhere, several momentary lapses into self-pity and a couple of lachrymose tangents are handled deftly and serve an honest purpose. When Cosentino sings “guess they see something in me” on Graceless Kids, we can feel her weighing things up before she adds “wish that I could see what they see”. It’s open-hearted, transparent, and effective.
In fact, that’s a pretty decent summation of the record’s whole vibe. ‘Always Tomorrow’ really only has a couple of things on its mind: filling in some recent history and kicking out some jams. Best Coast do that better than a lot of other bands, and they’ve been doing it for longer, too. Growing older is one thing, growing older with some style and grace is entirely another.
Best Coast Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Sun May 17 2020 - MANCHESTER Manchester Academy 3
Tue May 19 2020 - LONDON Electric Ballroom
Wed May 20 2020 - BIRMINGHAM O2 Institute2 Birmingham
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