We would venture to guess that most Californians couldn’t tell you that their official state song is I Love You, California – a nearly 100-year-old tune. It seems that it may be time for the Golden State to go with something a bit more modern and edgy, especially given that Oklahoma crowned The Flaming Lips’ Do You Realize as their state song back in 2009. With that in mind, we’d like to make the case for The Only Place, the title track from Best Coast’s sophomore album. The jangly surf-garage-pop tune is a giant love letter to Cali, with lyrics that extol the simple virtues of living there (We’ve got the ocean, got the babes / Got the sun, we’ve got the waves) while also wondering why would you’d want to live anywhere else.

Bethany Cosentino & Co., who kick off their North American summer tour with a high profile appearance at the first annual Metallica-curated Orion Festival in Atlantic City on June 24, released recently this music video for the track. Let’s check it out…

Best Coast – The Only Place

Back in 2010, Best Coast somewhat begrudgingly became the de facto face of chillwave, thanks in part to the band’s impressive debut album Crazy for You. The record combined hazy lo-fi psych rock, with a healthy dose of 1960′s girl-groups and surf-pop, and made for the perfect beach album. With the unofficial start to summer this weekend, it seemed only appropriate that Bethany Cosentino & Co. are back with their sophomore release The Only Place. This time around the Los Angeles-based band got some high profile help from Jon Brion (Fiona Apple, Punch Brothers, Kanye West), who produced the record, helping to give them a fuller sound, while still maintaining their decisively California influences (which is evident from the album cover, and a decent amount of Cosentino’s lyrics).

Lyrically, The Only Place features many of the same lovelorn themes as their debut, but this time around Cosentino is coming at them off her band’s quick rise to fame, and the many days and months spent on the road. Best Coast in the midst of a lengthy world tour, that continues tonight at the Aladdin Theater in Portland, Oregon, and also includes a high profile stop at the first annual Orion Festival in Atlantic City, New Jersey on June 24. Last week the newly augmented duo stopped by the Ed Sullivan Theatre to play their album’s title track on The Late Show With David Letterman.

A couple of  years back, many of us around HT headquarters fell in love with the hazy lo-fi sunshine pop sounds of Crazy For You, the debut album from Best Coast, which landed at number 24 on our top albums list for 2010. Fronted by Bethany Cosentino, the So-Cal-based band were at the forefront of the “chillwave” movement, whether they liked that distinction or not. On May 15, Best Coast will release their sophomore Jon Brion (Fiona Apple, of Montreal, Punch Brothers) produced effort The Only Place via Mexican Summer. The band will head to Austin for SXSW this week to drum up some advance press, playing a number of industry showcase parties, and will then head out for a lengthy world tour that kicks off with hometown gig at The Wiltern in Los Angeles on May 5, which will feature both JEFF The Brotherhood and Those Darlins holding down the opening slots.

If you’re not into a night with Best Coast’s brand of lo-fi pop, then maybe you’ll be interested in hitting on of these recently announced tours…

• Rusted Root: 20th Anniversary Tour (3/16 – 7/21)
• B.B. King: Spring North American Tour (3/17 – 5/29)
• Coheed & Cambria: Southeast Tour (4/29 – 5/18)
• Primus: U.S. Summer Tour (5/3 – 6/23)
• Ben Harper: West Coast Tour (6/30 – 7/5)
• Rhett Miller: U.S. Spring Tour (3/15 – 6/22)
• Margot & The Nuclear So & So’s: North American Tour (3/31 – 6/2)
• Blues Traveler, Barenaked Ladies, Big Head Todd & The Monster, Cracker: Last Summer On Earth Tour (7/6 – 8/19)

For the second consecutive year, we concocted an innovative little experiment for our year-end Best Albums list. Instead of picking the old fashioned way, we opted for something a little different: a collaborative, collective list that incorporates the opinions of everybody here at HT.

To begin, we devised an all-encompassing list of well over 100 nominees, whereby most everything our contributors recommended made this list. Then, we invited our crew of writers to independently and blindly vote on each album within the list on a scale of 1 to 20 (20 = epic). We ended up with varying degrees of familiarity for the nominees as some folks voted on just about everything, while some ranked just a few. From there, we deployed our egghead algorithm for rating albums: (two times the average rating) + (the total number of votes). At that point, we took the top 25 highest scores and presto: Hidden Track’s 25 Best Albums of 2010. No bullshit, no big opinions; just the results.

Let’s kick off our week long countdown of our favorite albums of 2010 with numbers 25 through 21…

25) Sleigh Bells – Treats

Key Tracks: Tell ‘Em, Infinity Guitars

Sounds Like: Electric Guitars and Cheerleaders

The Skinny: Sleigh Bells came out of nowhere in 2010 to emerge as a break out of the highest order. Despite being a just a duo, the boy-girl tandem of Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss manage to slug out bombs with their stomping beats, cutting guitar attacks and anthemic vocal hooks. With Treats, Sleigh Bells have created a genuinely unique twist on amped-up party music.

READ ON for the next four albums in our countdown…

As we continue to do some more end of the year house cleaning around HT’s home office to get it all tidied up for 2011, I figured it was about time to continue with a tradition around these parts by taking a look at my favorite six albums of the last half of the year with the Top 6 Of The Last 6…

6) Junip – Fields

Prior to his success as a solo artist, José González fronted the indie-rock band Junip in the late ’90s in his native country of Sweden. The short-lived group released a lone 4-song EP, before going their separate ways, mostly in part because of their label’s interest in González’s own material. The singer-songwriter regrouped with his off-again, on-again band mates deciding to record their long in the works full-length debut. The album features González’s familiar Nick Drake drenched in reverb vocals backed by a hypnotic mix of psychedelic folk-rock that draws its influences from jazz, electronica and Indian ragga-style rhythms.

READ ON for the rest of my Top 6 Of The Last Six…

In our never-ending quest to dig up great bands whose tickets cost less than a corned beef sandwich at Katz’s, we bring you another round of Blips. Blips highlights some great bands that are largely still in their larvae stage, but will soon morph into their beautiful butterfly. In this edition, we have some really cool new music, so take a sec, poke around the bands’ various websites, and see what you think of these four under the radar acts…

Best Coast

MySpace / Website

In music critics never-ending quest to label every sub-genre we now have something called “chillwave”. While I won’t wax poetic on that subject, one of the acts that have been lumped into this ever growing movement – along with the likes of Neon Indian, Beach Fossils and Memory Tapes – is Best Coast (whether they actually like it or not). The two-piece act, fronted by Bethany Cosentino, have been garnering a lot of much deserved blog attention over the last year after releasing a series of much buzzed about 7-inch singles. READ ON for more on Best Coast and three other acts…