Cayucas – Bigfoot

Zach Yudin, the main man behind Secretly Canadian signees Cayucas, has bided his time well. The Cayucos, CA native’s surf-inspired debut features songs that first caught waves under his previous recording moniker – Oregon Bike Trails – but have been reworked and reheated with Yudin helming a five-piece band for debut album Bigfoot.

The band wear their influences on short sleeves without subtle gestures or sleights of hand. Bigfoot sounds like sixties surf rock refracted through an indie-pop prism and it isn’t a trick of the light. Alongside vintage vinyl samples, a spectrum of influences from Beach Boys and The Tornadoes to Local Natives and Vampire Weekend bubble under and boil over to varying degrees. Dandy gradations of guitar and drums, layers of twiddled percussion with chimes and chants, oohs and ehs, create a happy-clappy, stutteringly dulcet melee.

At its best, Bigfoot could be the San Luis Obispo County equivalent of Metronomy’s The English Riviera, transporting the average urbanite to a sunny coastal clime with skipping insouciance. Excepting the lethargic last bars of ‘Will “The Thrill”‘, Cayucas convey the summer sun with heys rather than haze.

That they also avoid the suspicious wash of Instagrammed retro is partly attributable to lyrics that surpass expectations by being both romantic and consciously silly, adding more than a splash of irony to any too cool for surf school attitude. Careless happiness is introduced on the bouncingly energetic opener ‘Cayucos’, while ‘High School Lover’, distilling the band’s essence most effectively, offers “See, ever since I saw you on the back of some guy’s bicycle I’ve been feeling kind of so-so”. Lines like these signal a lack of solemn intent, though they give way to wistful futility soon afterwards. The Beach Boys didn’t sing about being gauche in love; in this setting, the songs suggest the missteps and insecurities of the beautiful people. ‘A Summer Thing’ matches jaunty hooks with lonely sentiments (“Now you’re watching the rain fall by yourself from your bedroom window / I’ll be checking the mailbox for the postcards that you said you’d send”), adding a twist of heartache to what might have been just mucking about in the shallows.

The constancy of the style creates a suspicion about whether – at thirty-one minutes – there are quite enough ideas to support a full album. ‘Deep Sea’ and ‘Ayawa ‘Kya’ suffer from an ebbing of momentum, the fluttering of the former ultimately repetitious to distraction. Notwithstanding the production efforts of latter day Shin Richard Swift, at these points this hooky, kooky album sounds slightly undercooked. The attention wanders a little before the title track, which ends proceedings with more benign beats and breezy chants.

Where unabashed beach hedonism might grate, Cayucas’s slightly awkward optimism imbues a friendly warmth, something humanising that softens the glare and freshens the sultry air. The surfers’ idyll is no mirage; only scenic surroundings for familiar fallibility. Bigfoot is bittersweet; cheerful and charming in small doses, and – as that’s all you get – it’s time well spent.