Cayucas have announced a new single, the perfect sunshine-pop nugget ‘High School Lover’, for 11th March 2013 as well as confirming the release date of their début album ‘Bigfoot’ for April 30th, via Secretly Canadian.
As Cayucas, band leader Zach Yudin has created a sound steeped in his sunny California roots, each track a perfectly crafted pop zinger. His catchy, addictive melodies are buoyed by syncopated rhythms and a breezy chorus of vocals. Built in layers and with exquisite atmospheric detail – the hiss of a needle in the groove, steel drum reverb, ambient party noise – Cayucas fixes to a place and time filled with the warmth of nostalgia and the joy of youth.
Cayucas: Pronounced “ky-yook-us”, it’s the (slightly misspelled) name of 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, who named his band after the town, will tell you, the place still holds on tight to its propensity for dreamy, lazy, bonfire-lit 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: mentions of weed, lolling around on the beach and musical references to Dick Dale are conspicuously absent. Instead, ‘Bigfoot’ possesses flirty rhythmic sensibilities both snappy and sparkling, a rosy, near-tropical warmth, and a loose and conversational feel that position you right in the line of Yudin’s wry gaze.
So chase away those January blues with the effervescent new video for ‘High School Lover’ below:
The video, directed by Cameron Dutra, features punchy neon visuals and a glitchy “live action stop-motion” effect developed by Dutra himself. It stars lead singer Zach Yudin as well as his band, which includes twin brother Ben on bass, Banah Winn on keys and Casey Wojtalewicz on drums.