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CAYUCAS

As Zach Yudin and his twin brother and bandmate, Ben, went in to create their new album, what it all came back to was something personal. While they now call Los Angeles home, they drew from the nostalgia of their childhood growing up in Davis, CA; the nostalgia in their music that is as much about a place they’ve never been as any actual experience. And it was that wandering imagination and a punchy California dream that eventually grew to become Dancing at the Blue Lagoon.

While their sun-drenched, jangly, sometimes melancholic sound is quintessentially Californian, the album very much their California. It’s the sound of kids from the suburbs who fantasize in Technicolor, whose view of the Golden State is its own form of idealism.

Dancing at the Blue Lagoon is all about a band testing its comfort zone and asking us to do the same. Zach and Ben would “create bands that were more like a musical idea,” record a few songs, and then move on. Cayucas grew out of this period of experimentation. Cayucas has taken sound we thought we knew and turned in into something personal and complex.

TRACK LISTING

Big Winter Jacket
Moony Eyed Walrus
Hella
Champion
Ditches
Dancing At The Blue
Lagoon
Backstroke
A Shadow In The Dark
Blue Lagoon (Theme Song)

Cayucas

Bigfoot

    Cayucas (pronounced ‘ky-yook-us’) is the monikered homage to a sleepy little seaside town in San Luis Obispo County, California. That town, Cayucos, has hardly changed in the last 50 years, a far cry from the gentrified tourist traps parading showily down the nearby coastline. In the early 1960s, the surfing craze hit. There was one bar around which local kids congregated back then, the site of helpless crushes and fights and games of pool, a place whose jukebox soundtracked innumerable teenage years as breezy summers rolled into mild winters and back around again. The bar has since disappeared, but as Zach Yudin, the man behind the name, will tell you, the place still holds on tight to its propensity for dreamy, lazy, bonfirelit nights worth getting moony-eyed about.

    Cayucas’ debut album bears little resemblance to the sound of modern California that’s been so omnipresent over the past few years. Instead, ‘Bigfoot’ possesses flirty rhythmic sensibilities both snappy and sparkling, a rosy, near-tropical warmth, and a loose and conversational feel, positioning you right in the line of Yudin’s wry gaze.

    Having moved to Japan for a year to teach, Zach Yudin became inspired by the country’s love of electronic music. He started writing Daft Punk-style material while he was out there, and experimenting with the vinyl sampling that would form a crucial component of Cayucas’ early sound - old rock albums by bands like The Beach Boys, The Tornadoes, and The Animals. Although he has since set aside the synthesizer, this braiding together of proto-pop group classics fed directly into the album.

    ‘Bigfoot’ was recorded up in the chilly Pacific Northwest - in Oregon, with Secretly’s Richard Swift in charge of production. It’s the result of Swift and Yudin’s symbiotic working relationship, and positivity is one of its brightest qualities, even when recalling missed opportunities - there’s no space for downcast vibes here.

    ‘High School Lover’ is perhaps ‘Bigfoot’s most quintessential song, centred around a chiming rhythm ripe for shimmying, and a tale that sums up Yudin’s taste for his own personal nostalgia. After working at a local independent jazz label for a couple of years, he’s now making music fulltime, rehearsing with his new band for Cayucas’ first live shows, running along the Venice Beach boardwalk, and hitting a certain bar each night to play pool, hang out, and listen to The Beach Boys.

    Cayucas

    Cayucos / Swimsuit

      No one knows summer like Santa Monica’s Zach Yudin. “Can you hear it comin’?” he asks, at the start of ‘Cayucos’, the opening salvo by his band Cayucas.

      With a nod to 60’s beach blanket pop gems and bonfire folk songs, Cayucas hits the waves runnin’, causing involuntary headbobs, finger snaps, toetaps and the ability to shake your booty like it’s strapped to a brand new set of maracas.

      Producer / multi-instrumentalist Richard Swift deftly captures Yudin’s inimitable voice as it echoes through the barrel of the perfect wave. It's a song for the ages for sure.

      B-side ‘Swimsuit’ continues to carry the torch, with its cocktail-lounge organ flourishes painting a picture of young, carefree days spent pining for your summer love.

      For fans of Best Coast, Beach Boys, Andrew Bird, Small Black, Foster The People, Here We Go Magic.


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