Cayucas are a very California band. Bigfoot is a very California album. Eight tracks – and not a weak spot to be found – that come from a guidebook on how not to outstay your musical welcome, it’s basically like sunshine coming along and farting in your face. In a good way.
It’s hypnotically breezy, and so entirely lacking in irritating SUMMER TUNES it’s difficult to not pick up each individual song and lick it in gratitude. To put it boringly, this album is bloody lovely. It’s an outdoor adventure holiday run by Animal Collective and Vampire Weekend (look to ‘Ayawa’kya’ and the title track for evidence of the latter’s preppy, Afrobeat-tinged influence). Opener ‘Cayucos’ has some of those ‘oh-way-oh’s we so fear in despicably cheerful songs, but the distortion wrapped around the vocals lends the track dreamy waves, an oddly enticing trick used across the album entire. ‘High School Lover’ shows off Zach Yudin’s Beck-ish voice to full, warm, effect. It’s particularly effective as an extra instrument, rippling through the soothingly simple melody like the track’s persistent drum beat. Honestly, if the first couple of tracks and the sheer joy they exude are not enough to swallow you up, it might be time you gave up music for something else, like staring into space, maybe.
There’s very little melancholy to be had; anything not entirely awash with buzzy energy simply embraces the sleepy cheeriness of a California beach town, all laid-back crooning and plinky, pretty guitars. ‘Will “The Thrill”’ is such a track, sauntering its way into view like a daydream, Yudin trilling ‘I was like, ‘oh my god’’ in the chorus with a gentle, yet affectionate, sarcasm. ‘A Summer Thing’ tracks a similar path; it’s also a beautifully sweet example of ‘Bigfoot’s fondness for musical nostalgia, reverberating like an echo of 1950s pop, of a toned-down Beach Boys ‘oooooh’-ing and harmonising with a backdrop of swooning chimes. ‘Bigfoot’s charm comes from its infectious sincerity. There are no knowing, cooler-than-thou winks of self-awareness; it’s all good, old-fashioned, all-American FUN.
‘Bigfoot’ is a rose-tinted road-trip of an album, all echoes and warmth like it’s a series of photos from an awesome, years-ago holiday when you were optimistic about life and all of that rubbish. Light, easygoing and perpetually relaxed about the Goliath-sized shadow cast by their influences, Cayucas approach their material with all the grace and wit of a band not keen on producing a reflection of a record, a cynical spoof of what’s already come before it. Nothing entirely original, then, but delightfully enthusiastic about it all the same. We’ll simply refrain from referring to it as ‘THE SOUNDTRACK TO YOUR SUMMER!’ because, well, that would make us pricks.
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