Best Coast + Male Bonding, Middle East Downstairs, Cambridge, MA

Best Coast has been hyped up big across the blogosphere and were voted California’s Best Band of 2010 by Boston’s Phoenix newspaper. This probably best explains why Tuesday night’s show at the Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge was nearly sold out. Before Bethany Cosentino and her band would appear, there were two opening bands.

First up is Young Adults, who can only be safely assumed as being local, as several punters shout out their love for any one of the three members of the band, and declare one of them to be, er, well endowed. Make of that what you will. While this band’s vocals run to the shouty side of rock and aren’t that great, with their sometimes lead vocalist and guitarist commenting at one point, ‘let’s do some more yelling!’, the guitar work is promising with some excellent riffs. The crowd seems pleased: while this is not music that would appeal to everyone, it’s a punk’s dream.

6/10

Male Bonding from Dalston is the other support band for the night. It is encouraging to see an indie band from London create so much atmosphere in a small American club. Maybe create an atmosphere are the wrong words to use; inciting a riot might be a better description. They launch into songs like ‘Weird Feelings’ with gusto, and the punters quickly rush to mosh and crowdsurf. Definitely not for the weak-stomached.

What’s interesting from a psychological standpoint is that the spontaneous moshing seems completely unrelated to actual song recognition, and maybe for a band from so far away, it’s a good thing that they’re able to connect with people not familiar with their music and cause them to dance around and bump each other around like idiots. The workhorse of the band is drummer Robin Christian, playing the drums as if his life depended on it and providing the driving force behind every Male Bonding song. Watching him play is probably worth the price of admission alone.

8/10

Best Coast is riding high on the proverbial waves of the current American surf pop movement, and they are the band everyone has come to see. Everyone there seems to have already procured their copy of ‘Crazy For You’, released on Mexican Summer in late July and described by the label as ‘a 12-track, twenty-nine minute collection of genuinely romantic sandy jams’. It all sounds so promising and you come to the show hoping for something amazing but unfortunately, what you hear is well trod-on territory, and all the songs start to blur together. It’s like ‘Boyfriend’ over and over again, with slight permutations. If you want to hear female vocals backed by sunny, beachy instrumentation, you’d best pick up a Go-Go’s album instead.

6/10