One of my favorite things on the internet right now is a little site called ‘fuckyeahghosttowns’ (it’s a popular naming convention for Tumblr blogs—don’t ask me why) which collects pictures and stories of abandoned and run-down places. I’ve noticed a good percentage of the locales featured are old Californian mining and railroad towns that fell into disrepair once the resources dried up. Kelso was one such town, founded in the 1920s as a railroad depot (it’s in the Mojave National Preserve on the route from Las Vegas to L.A.) and booming in the ’40s with the discovery of iron, borax, gold, and silver in the area. The mines closed after only about a decade and the town slowly dwindled for the next fifty years. In the ’70s, just before the introduction of things like cable and satellite dishes, Kelso and its roughly 80 remaining residents lay outside the reach of broadcast signals and became known as “the town without television.” Bethany Cosentino would’ve hated it.

In case you didn’t know, Ms. Cosentino is the principle singer and songwriter behind a little band called Best Coast (from Los Angeles, of course). She loves to watch TV, eat junk food, play with her now famous cat Snacks, and smoke marijuana. Along with (her boyfriend) Wavves, she’s become something of a temporary indie pop idol—a California ambassador for the Pitchfork set—positioning those suburban pastimes against post-ironic songs about teenage romance, longing, and boredom. I told the story about the town of Kelso because I wanted to point out the rather obvious fact that the songs on Best Coast’s debut album, Crazy for You, don’t emanate from the real Golden State so much as a California of the mind. It’s a step beyond self-conscious fantasy, where the line between the Cosentino we read on Twitter and the woman wailing “I wish we could go back to when I was seventeen” on closer “Each & Everyday” becomes a moot distinction. The lack of performative distance here means that art and artist are practically one in the same, hence her appeal as a persona, not just as a musician. It also means that some people will be put off by the potentially banal and utterly straightforward nature of her work.

Musically, surf, punk, and grunge are the order of the day here, all framed in crunchy reverb and saccharine 60s pop melodicism. In that sense, this is a sound that speaks to our particular cultural moment (when the pendulum of nostalgia is swinging toward the Clinton years) and functions within a simplistic enough framework to not alienate anyone who isn’t looking for anything pretentious. Most of these songs stay in the bouncy middle tempos, with drums that do little more than keep time for Cosentino’s ubiquitously fuzzy rhythm guitar (which sticks to lower chords in lieu of a bass guitar) and the periodic lead guitar highlight from Bobb Bruno. Bruno, the long-haired metalhead of few words with a knack for vintage surf riffs and a soft spot for pop hooks, is a good working foil for Cosentino’s starry-eyed/glazed schtick and really makes this record. Though his direct contributions aren’t always prominent, you realize how much he brings to the table on standouts like “Boyfriend,” “Our Deal,” and bonus track “When I’m With You,” one of the duo’s early singles that fueled the Best Coast hype. The well-wrought tone and intrinsic catchiness of his leads add a sense of openness and interplay to what are otherwise very compact and repetitive tunes.

But I don’t mean to sound like I’m begrudging Best Coast their success. Crafting music that feels immediate, natural, and comfortable while retaining a modicum of identity and making sense over a narrative arc isn’t nearly as easy as people think (trust me, I’ve tried). We take pop for grated because we’re so used to it, but we still don’t understand the power it can have over us. Sure, “baby” always rhymes with “crazy,” “miss you” with “kiss you,” and “friend” with “end,” but whoever said substance and feeling couldn’t lurk within obvious couplets? Songs like “The End,” “I Want To,” “Summer Mood,” and the aforementioned “Boyfriend” are all about the exact same thing: wanting to be with someone who just wants to be friends. How many of the all-time great pop songs that we still revere have covered that subject? Cosentino has the kind of voice that can deliver simplistic sentiments with clarity and force, bolstering her case for transparency. Even if Crazy for You doesn’t make waves beyond the summer of 2010 (and I would argue that, as an album, it shouldn’t—BC are best treated as a singles band / mix tape fodder), the irrefutable fact remains that they’ve never given us a reason to expect otherwise. It’s not a tacit endorsement of shallowness or vapidity, it’s a plea for emotional directness. If getting there requires lowered defenses and teenage melodrama, so be it. Gotta get off the couch somehow, right?