Why do we have to make this hard/when it doesn’t have to be?

It’s a question Bethany Cosentino asks her boyfriend on “The End,” one of the many gems on Best Coast’s soon to be released Crazy For You. It could also serve as a sort of battle cry for the brand of back-to-basics music the band has ridden to the top of this summer’s buzz-band list.

Yet anyone whose ever dreamed of being a rock star can tell you writing a song as beautifully infectious as “Boyfriend,” which opens the California-based band’s debut, is no easy feat. In fact, Cosentino strings together so many irresistible hooks and melodies on this record that we might assume she is some grizzled veteran of the surf-rock scene only masking herself as a 23 year-old. That is, if each song weren’t dripping with so much of her youthful personality.

Ultimately Best Coast succeeds by burying weighty emotions in sugary riffs and deceptively catchy lines. Nearly every tune is about a boy, and the themes are strictly longing, heartbreak or regret. “I wish you would tell me how you really feel/But you’ll never tell me,” describing a frustratingly non-communicative relationship on “Our Deal.” These are universal stories and Cosentino almost always sounds like she is singing to you from her bedroom (pipe in hand), mumbling and purring around contagious rhythms. It’s like your best friend – your 16 year-old best friend – telling you a story over the phone. Bonus track “When I’m With You,” a breakout hit for Cosentino last year, is still perhaps the best example of her lazy genius. It begins slow before bursting into a high-energy event, carried by a monster riff and one mouth-watering melody after another. It soars up and up towards an epic finale with the singer shouting passionately, “I hate sleeping alone.”

Again the effortlessness on display only disguises the craft – and pain – present in each tune. There is an overwhelming sense of nostalgia throughout the album, but it isn’t simply a desire to return to past relationships or feelings. Crazy For You emerges as an epic ode to being an emerging adult and the experience of first discovering love. On “I Want To” she sings “I want to go back to, the first time, the first place,” and though it only simulates being young again, with this album Bethany Cosentino has crafted something we here at B-Sides will go back to again and again.

Especially when compiling the best of 2010.