Before I wrote my Best Coast review, I really enjoyed the album. I wanted to listen to it a few times in a setting other than at my desk, though, so I lay down on my bed and listened with good headphones. I went from being bullish on the album to almost detesting it. It sounded terrible, which accounts for 75% of my vituperation for the record.

Here’s a screenshot of GarageBand. (Maybe you can click to enlarge it? Here’s a link to the image, either way.) You may want to notice a few things. The first five tracks in the GarageBand window (and all of them, really are high-quality mp3s) from Crazy For You: “Boyfriend,” “The End,” “Our Deal,” “Happy,” and “When I’m With You.” I selected the first because it’s the first song, the next four are quieter, and the final one because it’s clearly the best song on the album for several reasons. You’ll notice that the levels in all the best coasts songs push right up against the boundaries of the tracks. (In case you don’t know, the volume level of the tracks is represented by the horizontal, jagged bars running left-to-right in the yellow area of the image.) “Our Deal” and “Happy” are not as ‘bad’ as “Boyfriend” “When I’m With You” is pretty dynamic and spacious except for the chorus, which is fine. My major problem with the sound of the record is that it’s too loud, and so much of it. It’s loud nearly all the time. Loudness isn’t used for effect. My branching second problem with the album is that this type of music really shouldn’t be loud. The Best Coast EPs sounded all fucked up, but they were not nearly as loud. They were pleasant to listen to even if they weren’t as somewhat clear as the album. I say somewhat clear because the album is less ostensibly lo-fi than the previous recordings, but it’s so loud that the guitars are all snapping and grating. Rather than a warm distortion that you’d think a beach rock band would seek, Best Coast has created a nearly unlistenable-to noise album.

The tracks below the Best Coast tracks are from other artists. The next one, sixth down, is My Bloody Valentine’s “Only Shallow.” This is at times a loud, abrasive song, but its levels never get near the heights of anything on Best Coast’s debut album. I realize the album is overall mixed softer, but the dynamic range between loud and soft is there. There’s tons of space, even when there are guitars falling all around you and you’re afraid your head is going to get caved in. The next track is Nas’ “NY State of Mind,” which is not really fair to even put there. But I think the first Nas album (and a lot of rap music, generally) is the best-sounding album of all-time. The drum hits are plucky and self-contained. You can hear everything. Whatever, it’s not fair to compare Best Coast to it, but it’s there as an ideal. The next track is Aphex Twin’s “Come To Daddy.” (The first song on the Come To Daddy EP/Single. I forget what it’s called, specifically.) That’s a pretty abrasive song, and it looks like cotton candy next to all the Best Coast tracks. The next one is Broken Social Scene’s “KC Accidental,” which is one of the loudest, most aggressive BSS songs I could think of. This part here is the chorus, I believe, and it is loud. But there’s again, a range between loud and soft. The next one (second to last) is The Darkness’ “Get Your Hands Off My Woman Motherfucker,” or whatever it’s called. The final one is Deerhoof’s “Dummy Discards A Heart.” Both those songs are loud as hell (although the Deerhoof one has more of a loud/soft dynamic overall). But they’re supposed to be loud songs.

I guess my overall point with going on and on about disliking the Best Coast record is that I don’t think their aesthetic calls for making an incredibly loud, obnoxious record. It’s their record; whatever. They can make it how they want, but it’s a total flop in my book for sounding the way it does. Crazy For You sounds more like a Merzbow record, but it’s supposed I think to sound like a roughed-up pop record. That’s a failure in my book. I know this is probably a dilettantish way to go about looking at all this. But it gave me a little objective validation for what I knew I heard.