These days, it’s not uncommon to hear moviegoers, exhausted by new releases based on toys, comic books, or films they’ve already seen, lament the disappearance of a middle ground between blockbuster and avant-garde: stories that are character-driven but not too opaque or ponderous, that are neither blind to suffering nor drowning in pathos, that aren’t fusty or overly youth-obsessed. That same void exists, to a lesser degree, in the music industry. It’s easy to find records that feel raw and challenging, or, conversely, records that have been focus-grouped and smoothed into oblivion. It is much more difficult to find music that explores whatever might lie in between.
On “Natural Disaster,” out this month, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist Bethany Cosentino takes an unexpected swing at normie rock and roll. The album’s references are clear: Liz Phair in her “Why Can’t I?” era, Alanis Morissette, Pete Yorn, the Wallflowers, Don Henley, Matchbox Twenty, and, perhaps most vividly, Sheryl Crow, who in the second half of the nineties had a lock on bluesy, loping, straightforward guitar pop. Cosentino, who was born in Los Angeles, came of age as part of Best Coast, an indie-rock duo she formed with the multi-instrumentalist Bobb Bruno. Best Coast released its début LP, “Crazy for You,” in 2010, and Cosentino became beloved for her gauzy and cacophonous tunes about longing and despair. She had recently spent a depressed nine months living in Brooklyn, interning at The Fader, and studying journalism and creative nonfiction at the New School; the band coalesced once she returned—prodigally, gratefully—to California. She knew Bruno through L.A.’s D.I.Y. scene, which was then centered around the Smell, an all-ages performance and gallery space downtown. The band’s early vibe was scrappy, anti-commercial, experimental.
“Crazy for You,” which was put out by the independent record company Mexican Summer, quickly gained traction in the blogosphere (a coterie of irreverent and now mostly defunct Web sites dedicated to dissecting new releases). It appeared on Pitchfork’s year-end list and on the Billboard 200, where it peaked at No. 36—no small achievement for a new band on a small label. In 2012, Cosentino and her then boyfriend, Nathan Williams of Wavves, were on the cover of Spin. Cosentino, who played a baby-blue Fender Mustang and wrote most of the band’s songs, had become the face of a certain kind of hazy, millennial cool: she liked weed, her cat, Brian Wilson, punk rock, and being online. The band’s reverb-heavy vocal harmonies suggested a whimsical nihilism; “Crazy for You” often gave me the feeling of lounging on a beach blanket stoned, wondering if I could sink far enough into the hot sand to disappear entirely. As a front woman, Cosentino was not without affect or feeling, and her lyrics could be heavy with desire, but her delivery was always a little deadpan. Best Coast released three more albums, each of which expanded the band’s sound and scope. Cosentino seemed to be grappling with the uphill slog of self-actualization: how to bridge the ravine between the earnest wish to change and her ability to actually do so. (Cosentino has a tattoo on one finger that reads “TRUST NO ONE.” On a finger of her opposite hand: “let it go.”)
In 2020, Best Coast released its fourth album, “Always Tomorrow.” Cosentino had recently got sober, and the record’s lyrics emphasized a kind of anodyne positivity. On the single “Everything Has Changed,” Cosentino considered old grievances. “I used to cry myself to sleep / Reading all the names they called me,” she sang. Nonetheless, she remained a bit wary of personal growth. What else might be washed away by the waters of self-betterment? “If everything’s O.K. / Then what the hell do I complain about?” was how she put it.
Earlier this year, Cosentino, who is now thirty-six, announced that Best Coast was on indefinite hiatus, and that she would be releasing a solo album under her own name. “Natural Disaster” was produced by the Americana singer and songwriter Butch Walker, who has worked on such mainstream fare as Taylor Swift’s “Red” and Pink’s “The Truth About Love,” and on tense, hooky records by such pop-punk acts as Fall Out Boy, Avril Lavigne, and Panic! At the Disco. If Cosentino’s shift toward a more radio-friendly sound is unsurprising—the last two Best Coast records were inching toward this sort of tunefulness—her aptitude for it is still remarkable. Cosentino has a rich, burly voice that’s unpretentious without feeling artless. She sounds both committed and hungry.
“Natural Disaster” is not quite a country record, but the production is meaty and proficient in a way that feels, somehow, unique to Nashville. (Walker, who has played in various rock bands over the years, runs a home studio there.) The songs are jangly and palatable. At moments, they can be predictable—“I hate to sound cliché and cheesy,” Cosentino, eternally self-aware, sings on “Easy”—but I suppose that’s sort of the point. “Natural Disaster” is for car stereos (windows down, Wayfarers on), back-yard barbecues, and maybe, one day, the air-conditioned aisles of pharmacies and supermarkets. The psychic and sonic dissonance of Cosentino’s early songwriting is almost entirely gone. During a recent interview, she took the reporter to a drive-through Starbucks, a move that would have been a P.R. calamity for a tattooed indie-rock darling in the late two-thousands. (“I’m a real chain girl, sorry,” Cosentino said.) She seems mostly done with the underground. If you, like me, have a punk-rock heart, it’s tempting to regret this shift—though it might represent the first time that Cosentino’s promises of reinvention have felt wholly real.
The title track, which opens the album, works as a companion piece to Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up the Sun” (a Top Forty hit back in 2002), only with a heavy dose of climate anxiety. The hook is catchy and supple. Crow was advocating joy as an act of radical defiance. “I’m gonna soak up the sun / I’m gonna tell everyone to lighten up,” she sang on the chorus. Cosentino is too savvy and worn out to be an optimist, but she has found levity in the gloom, accepting mutual destruction as the cost of being alive:
On “It’s Fine,” Cosentino considers her past. “Imagine if I handled this shit like I used to,” the song begins. The exact conflict Cosentino is referring to is never quite clear—maybe she’s talking to an ex mired in arrested development—but the song ultimately unfolds like a letter to her former self. “I am evolved / You’ve stayed the same,” she observes. In the end, time has helped her find out what she wants. “With a little bit of wind blowing through my mind / It’s fine,” she sings, her voice light.
The one fear that remains is what happens next. On “Easy,” which opens with a plaintive, sombre piano line, she worries that she’s missed some subtle cue to settle down, start a family:
Cosentino, who has been singing about change—as both hope and necessity—for years, seems to finally understand that real transformation isn’t a mountain you climb but a slow, never-ending odyssey. Clouds come; clouds go. “Natural Disaster” feels like her most adult record, and not just because the songs are short, familiar, and easy to like. She’s comfortable enough with her own ongoing evolution to make it sound breezy. Or, as she sings on “My Own City,” “I didn’t even cry / When I left myself behind.” ♦
