Chicago – It was so easy to fall in love with Bethany Cosentino when she made her Best Coast album debut in 2010 with “Crazy for You”. She looked so cute strumming her guitar, playing her fuzzy surf pop odes to hook up regrets, and dedicating songs to her cat “Snacks”. It was exactly the lust she often referred to in her music, “When I’m with you, I have fun…” It’s also been this sort of musical first impression that’s furthered Bethany’s career while also remaining her one underlying flaw; an enjoyable one trick pony that’s adorable on the surface, but hollow in its core. By her second album, last year’s “The Only Place”, we were once again treated to more of the same giddy summer day convertible music, only with brighter and shinier production quality. While the record warranted no complaints, the repetition of song writing dimmed her allure, and the growing familiarity with Bethany made her less of a progressive crush and more of a previous fling. “Fade Away”, the latest EP from Best Coast, is a hint that there’s more to Bethany than what we’ve become accustomed to, but in the meantime provides the same waves of insecure pop ballads with added angst and reduced cuddliness.

“This Lonely Morning” kicks off the EP with more distortion than we’ve previously heard from Best Coast, but is essentially the same song we’ve heard numerous times before. It’s obvious she knows how to write a catchy song, but she follows the “ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mantra too close to heart and I can’t help but wonder if she’s really trying anymore. “I Wanna Know” is another exercise of Bethany growing tired of the same guys she’s been dating since “Crazy for You”, but the parallel of never learning from previous romantic mistakes and playing the same chord patterns from her past two albums forces me not to feel sorry for her anymore.

What’s successful about Bethany’s lyrics are that they never come off as gender biased. In “Who Have I Become”, both guys and girls can relate to the subtle shame of, “waking up to strangers with their shadows on my face”. It’s these moments of honesty that remind us why we fell in love with Best Coast in the first place, but there seems to be too many moments on “Fade Away” where Bethany steers away from personality in favor of generic lyrics where you can often assume what she’s going to rhyme next.

When she slows things down on the latter half of “Fade Away” is when you really start to feel the frustration and loneliness of the lyrics coincide with the music. The ballad rock chords topped with lingering solo overdubs on “Fear Of My Identity” make her confessions of “You taught me how to grow old” more believable. But then she throws in the cliché drum line from The Jesus and the Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” that’s been recycled a hundred times, and you truly question if she’s running out of ideas.

At the end of “Fade Away”, she pulls out a song like “Baby I M Crying”, a slowed down blender of slide guitar, tambourine, and textured reverb guitars, and there’s a glimpse of the songwriting potential she’s still keeping locked away at times. There’s the Rivers Cuomo element to Bethany that does a good job of mixing cheeky fun with woeful loathing, but too often she chooses to settle for comfortability when it’s evident there are more risks for her to explore. While “Fade Away” will provide Best Coast fans with a short convenient fix, it leaves more on the line for her next album that will help those on the fence decide whether to truly commit to her or dump her like all those poor boys she still feels sorry for.