Best Coast

Bethany Cosentino's dad-rocking turn on last year's The Only Place proved to be more affecting than many thought it would be. However, on Best Coast's new seven-song EP, she sounds like a woman in transition. Her music has always addressed personal anxieties, usually in regards to boys, her cat (Snacks) and smoking weed, in that order. The Only Place threatened that holy muse trifecta when it appeared that Cosentino had found some modicum of inner happiness. Here, those anxieties have once again come to the forefront. This, in many ways, is the batch of songs that would have been a logical follow up to Best Coast's debut. "It's alarming how charming you can be/and though I know it's wrong I've done it all along/but now it's time to say baby, good bye," she sings on "I Wanna Know," suggesting that even happiness creates its own set of anxieties. Terminating relationships — she never explicitly states whether romantic or plutonic — is a constant theme throughout. Sonically, the EP is slick, but with enough fuzzy crunch to please both the underground that birthed Cosentino and the mainstream that's increasingly willing to accept her. Fade Away is by no means a backslide — these are some of Cosentino's best songs to date — but rather than pointing the way forward, this EP feels more like the end of an era.