California duo puts girly spin on simple surf-pop
NEW YORK (Billboard) – She's a breezy California surf rocker, a
throwback '90s indie queen and a savvy Twitter star all rolled into one.
But Best Coast singer-songwriter Bethany Cosentino is something else
too: a certifiable "It" girl who has been featured in Vogue and Rolling Stone. The California-based Best Coast -- comprising Cosentino and
multi-instrumentalist Bobb Bruno -- is riding a wave of blog buzz into
the mainstream spotlight, a first for the band and its label,
Brooklyn-based indie label Mexican Summer, which picked up the pair's
debut, "Crazy for You." "She's the only artist I can remember that hasn't had the backlash for
being a blog band," Mexican Summer director of marketing/label manager
Jeffrey Kaye says. "People are championing her and want her to succeed." "Crazy for You" entered the Billboard 200 last week at No. 36 with 10,000 units sold and debuted at No. 10 on the Digital Albums chart. Best Coast, which begins its first U.S. tour September 4, specializes in
sun-baked, simple, short surf-pop ditties, sung in a dry, girly
monotone and recorded in a '90s lo-fi style. The band's sales breakdown is a bit of a throwback, too. Kaye reports
that sales have been running 50 percent digital, 30 percent CD and 20
percent vinyl -- very gratifying for the label, which started as a
purely digital/vinyl outlet. Best Coast is its first CD release. "You would have thought a good chunk of that audience would have
downloaded it illegally and been done," Kaye says. "But given the
package's artwork and the hand-numbered copies, they wanted to own it."
No comments:
Post a Comment