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Music

Best Coast and Wavves

BEST COAST with WAVVES at the Phoenix (410 Sherbourne), Sunday (February 6), 8 pm. $18. TM, SS, RT. See listing.


In an apartment somewhere in suburban Los Angeles, Bethany Cosentino and Nathan Williams are in separate rooms talking to different people yet having the same conversation.

Williams, lounging in front of the television, his bong within arm’s reach, fields questions from an interviewer over the phone about felines, pot-smoking and the new sound of California as embodied in his pop punk band, Wavves, while Cosentino is talking to me in another room and answers similar queries regarding her equally catchy SoCal pop group, Best Coast.

The two 20-somethings share a bed and a parallel take on fuzzy pop punk, and now they’ll share a stage on an upcoming North American tour that could be described as a coming out party for indie rock’s undisputed power couple.

“We met when we were teenagers,” says Cosentino, recalling a train ride she took at 18 to San Diego, where she was introduced to Williams through a mutual friend.

“I was visiting a friend, and we just met and started hanging out. We didn’t meet at a Wavves show or Best Coast show. I knew him well before he was Wavves. I know the real Nathan Williams.”

That would be a Williams distinct from the mercurial Wavves persona he’s built in the three years since his crude bedroom-made, self-titled debut vaulted him into the public eye. By most accounts, he’s a chronic pothead malcontent with an affected cool attitude and beefs with other bands, not to mention a checkered live performance history that includes a spectacular meltdown at a Spanish music fest in 09.

But like Cosentino, Williams has an undeniable talent for simplified songcraft, and last year’s King Of The Beach proved as much to those who’d written him off as a mere lo-fi curiosity. The album, his first made in a proper studio under the guidance of a real producer (Dennis Herring), dances cleverly between flippant self-deprecation, nasal California snarl and anthemic rock choruses not far removed from a Blink 182 jam.

It’s a solid spin for the most part, and has in some ways rehabilitated the enfant-terrible rep Williams has acquired over the years. It’s as if King Of The Beach insists you take Wavves seriously even if he doesn’t feel compelled to do the same. Williams introduced a song at his record release last summer by saying, “This is the most boring song on our stupid new record.”

“I try not to think about the way people receive things and just try to have fun and write songs that I think sound cool, and that’s basically it,” says Williams, who sounds distracted as he channel-flips before landing on The Talk, in a later interview.

“In the beginning, with any band that gets hype or whatever, people want you to fail the second time around.”

Cosentino says her boyfriend has nothing to apologize for, and he certainly didn’t make a slick-sounding record – at least compared to his prior releases – to silence his critics.

“I don’t think he needed to do anything to make people think differently of him, and I don’t really think he gives a fuck what people think,” she says defensively. “He just wants to make music, which is what we all wanna do.

“He made a good record, and people really liked it, and it was a record that showcased his talent as a songwriter.”

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She could be talking about her own debut, Crazy For You, which came out last summer a month before Wavves’. But in the case of that record, saying people liked it would be something of an understatement, since it was one of the year’s most critically acclaimed releases, sold respectably and charted near Billboard’s top 40.

Now Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo is ringing her to collaborate (they worked on a song last fall), the British press is going gaga, ranking her the number-one new act of 2010, and her growing legion of Twitter followers, nearly 30,000, hang on her every character.

Fascination with Cosentino has superseded her music to the point where her personal life is as much the subject of discussion as the simple, reverb-soaked pop tunes about boyfriends, bags of weed and couch-pinned laziness on Crazy For You.

Even her cat, Snacks, who appears in lyrics and on the cover art for Crazy, has become a hot topic for fixated Best Coast fans. As of this writing, “Snacksthecat” has over 5,000 Twitter followers.

“Everywhere I go, people ask, ‘Where’s Snacks?’ or ‘Tell your cat I said hi,'” she laughs, adding that she has an interview coming up with Cat Fancy later in the day. “Someone wrote him a poem actually. It’s pretty hilarious.

“I didn’t mean to do it, but I thought the band needed a mascot, and I unintentionally made it my cat. It’s pretty cool, because I love him.”

Raised in L.A. by a music teacher and session ace father, Cosentino was a child performer and can be found doing the conga in a Little Caesars Pizza commercial if you dig deep enough. She later drifted into the local underground scene and formed an experimental drone group called Pocahaunted whose career high point was opening for Sonic Youth.

Aspiring to become the next Joan Didion, Cosentino ditched Pocahaunted and L.A. for writing school in New York City, where she lived for nine miserable months before dropping out and calling her mom for help moving back home.

At that point, in 2009, Best Coast took shape, with Cosentino finding a newfound appreciation for Ramones-influenced direct pop, palm trees and life without public transportation.

She reacquainted herself with L.A.-based multi-instrumentalist Bobb Bruno, who took her raw tracks and added drums, bass and lead guitar. Eventually, the pair worked with producer Lewis Pesacov to give Crazy For You a hazy, sun-bleached quality.

“What I like about Beth’s record is that it was just so straightforward,” says Williams. “There was no…. It was just so simple, and there’s something so easy about it. Sometimes the best songs are the simple ones.”

Being one of the few public couples in the indie music world, Williams and Cosentino are dealing with a surge of TMZ-like curiosity about their private affairs. It’s made them a focal point for internet sniping, most frequently on faux blog Hipster Runoff, which eventually got the best of Cosentino back in November. She broke down on her blog, posting a heated missive to the haters called Real Talk.

“With the success of your band and people caring about your personal life, not everybody is going to like you,” she laments. “I was dealing with trying to accept that. People say dumb shit on the internet and to your face, but people are always going to say dumb shit.

“At first it bothers you or you get used to it. Or you just learn to stop caring, which is what I’ve had to do. When people are more interested in your relationship or what you ate for dinner or what you’re wearing, it’s kind of weird, because you never expected anyone to care about that.”

Williams is more succinct in his assessment of the situation.

“I don’t really give a shit what people think, so it doesn’t matter.”

music@nowtoronto.com

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