Concert Review: Best Coast at Grand Central

Grand Central, we hardly knew ye. The downtown Miami nightclub, which opened about five years in a converted train depot, has announced it will be closing in about a month, and last night’s Best Coast/Lovely Bad Things bill marked its last great indie-rock show.

(The Lovely Bad Things)

The two acts, both from California, paired like sunblock and sunscreen, strikingly similar almost to a fault. The caffeinated clatter of Lovely Bad Things sounded like Best Coast with a screamier edge, an appetizer with similar ingredients right down to the pretty female lead and the band of boys backing her, providing a three-guitar squall.

It was all well and good, but when Best Coast took the stage shortly after 10, it was clear who deserved to be the headliner. As the band members approached their positions, Spanish guitars bled into a recording of Metallica’s “Battery,” an energetic if incongruent counterpoint to Best Coast’s confessional noise-pop. Singer/songwriter Bethany Cosentino emerged last, her shoulder-length hair obscuring her face as much as framing it, and plunging right into an opening stanza of unbridled ear candy—“Heaven Sent,” “The Only Place,” “Fine Without You” and “Crazy For You”—that traversed the group’s three LPs.

It was great dance music, if you had the space to move, but the place was shoulder-to-shoulder packed, the sightlines as bad as I’ve ever encountered them at Grand Central. The tunes were delicious nonetheless, and delivered by their writer with therapeutic passion; I could detect a bitter sneer to her performance of the breakup anthem “Goodbye.” “California Nights,” the languorous title track of the group’s 2015 album, was even better live, marinating in a warm bath of feedback that wouldn’t sound out of place on a My Bloody Valentine album. It was arguably the set’s shimmering, grandiose centerpiece.

With a time allotment that permitted nearly 20 songs, Best Coast delved deeply and pleasingly into its oeuvre, settling into more experimental rhythms and genres as the night progressed, from the groovy lounge reverie of “Dreaming My Life Away” to a pair of cuts from the 2013 EP “Fade Away.” “I Don’t Know How” felt like a Loretta Lynn country ballad turned fist-pumping punk rocker, a singular song that ranks among the band’s most underrated.

Cosentino didn’t speak much, but she loosened up as the clock approached 11—especially after an admiring fan delivered her a bouquet of flowers. Prefacing the acrid “Jealousy,” which she said was about haters, she added that said haters could “suck it.” About her occasionally wobbly stage presence, she informed us that, “I’m not drunk, I’ve just never worn these shoes before.” She was pleased and nervous to report that “Sleep Won’t Ever Come” was the first time the song had been performed live. “There were a couple of mistakes,” she conceded after the performance, and they were noticeable, but it only proved she’s human.

It wasn’t the only aural blemish. “So Unaware” and “Jealousy,” to name just a couple, drowned in overwhelming bass guitar. And Cosentino didn’t seem to be 100 percent on key 100 percent of the time, but the raw passion of her delivery more than made up for any technical imperfections. Best Coast may have softened the feedback-drenched noise of its early stuff for a crisper, sprightlier recorded sound, but under the stabbing stage lights of Grand Central, they took us back to the garage.

SET LIST