Kevin Bronson on March 17th, 2012

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The new material from Best Coast – whose sophomore album “The Only Place” arrives May 15 – seems soaked in “woe-is-me” and “I-don’t-know,” but there was no lack of certitude Friday at Stubb’s BBQ in Austin, where the L.A. quartet was second-billed at the annual SPIN party during South by Southwest.

“Play the hits!” somebody called out halfway through the set. “Suck my dick,” frontwoman Bethany Cosentino barked back in between pops of Jim Beam out of a bottle, noting that, after all, this was a day party at SXSW, and “I’m gonna do whatever the f*ck I want.”

Best Coast did, dispensing its lazy, nodding pop ahead of a headlining set by the re-emergent Santigold and her new single “Disparate Youth,” and after crisp sets from Chairlift and the Big Pink. Best Coast, which the previous day had won an MTV Woodie Award at SXSW for its Drew Barrymore-directed video for “Our Deal,” has Cosentino’s slacker charm as a calling card but musically the quartet is very much the Bobb Bruno Band; his washes and trickles of guitar add at least a measure of acclivity to otherwise prostrate songs. The new song “How They Want to Be” (“I don’t want to be / how they want me to be”) is a slide guitar and a couple y’alls away from a country song – on this afternoon, at least, it rang very true.

Coachella-bound the Big Pink played an expansive (as is possible in broad daylight) set of their house-meets-shoegaze music, with principals Milo Cordell and Robbie Furze joined by Zan Lyons and new live drummer Victoria Smith. The Big Pink’s 2009 single “Dominos” still dominates their set, and their hook-laden second album “Future This” (which came out in January) struggles to match its explosiveness. Still, a half hour or so of the quartet’s bottom-heavy blasts was plenty to shake out the SXSW cobwebs.