Next time some jerk tries to act like there aren’t any transcendental, life-changing bands in indie rock right now, slide them a copy of Cayucas’ Bigfoot, cross your arms and wait for the spoils of victory. To clarify a bit, this Santa Monica tropical-pop act does not strike me as transcendental or life-changing, though they could play a role in some really chill BBQs in the coming months. Rather, spend any amount of time with Bigfoot or, more pointedly, their video for "High School Lover", and something becomes very, very clear: There is almost no doubt that things just haven’t been the same for Zach Yudin since he heard the first Vampire Weekend LP. And rightfully so: It’s a phenomenal record and Vampire Weekend deserve to be a primary influence by this point. But while Yudin may have patterned his vocal inflection, choice of guitar, taste in graphic design and footwear selection after Ezra Koenig, Bigfoot is a record that could've taken a more important lesson to heart: why would you tape my conversations?
Maybe Yudin's just not a contra, but rather a young man who defines himself through a preoccupation with his latest crushes in both music and girls. That’s not a bad thing either, those are two concerns that can take up a lot of real estate in anyone's mind. It gives a measure of relatability to Bigfoot, which is very much a small-stakes record of serotonin-stoking songs about beaches, parties and girls, albeit from the wry, collegiate perspective that’s more post-grad Beach Week than beach bum. And as a vocalist, Yudin has an easy charm, writes elongated melodies that stick and has the good sense to repeat them just in case they don’t the first time around.
Sure, a lot of them are tracework: even without its jerky, stop-motion video, the “ay!”s punctuating “High School Lover” would immediately recal “A-Punk”; “Deep Sea” strolls the same quad as “Campus”; "East Coast Girl"'s got the same new face that Blake did, and “Ayawa 'kya” sports the kind of onomatopoetic fake patois that people who hate Vampire Weekend assume they use in all of their songs. But falling shy of Koenig’s standards is hardly a crime and besides, Cayucas crib just as much from the first round of bands who caught the VW bug-- the parts of the first Surfer Blood album that actually sounded like Weezer on an island in the sun, Lord Huron’s odd rocksteady moments, to name a few. Richard Swift unifies it all with a peculiar production touch that disengages Cayucas from these first-person story-songs; Yudin is distanced by bouncing reverb, the low-end is laced with static and scuffs, and samples of dialogue are disconnected from the lyrics. With all that in mind, Cayucas might just be a version of Foxygen restricted to the past four years of indie rock rather than the past four decades of all rock music.
Which would be fine if Cayucas really were satisfied with hitting us off with California English and not much else, but Yudin's unmet lyrical ambitions cut against Bigfoot’s simple pleasures. Whereas the mere mention in Koenig’s lyrics of Tom’s toothpaste, a taxi driver’s white glove, or oxford commas can spark spirited debate about privilege, identity and image, well, who gives a fuck about a rugby sweater if all Yudin can share is that it’s got "yellow and maroon stripes"? Despite peppering his lyrics with mentions of bicycles, old school BMWs, postcards and other simple pleasures of the West Coast well-off, they merely fill space; the girl who should’ve been his high school lover, the “Summer Thing”, and the “East Coast Girl” are pretty much interchangeable. On the latter, he mentions she’s majoring in “English literature,” but it signifies little, other than that it fit more easily into the melody than, say, “economics” or “general studies.”
Beyond Yudin’s massive artistic debt, Cayucas’ main flaw is failing to recognize the difference between leaving something to the imagination and making the listener do all the hard work. He’s observant, but lacks insight, descriptive without offering any commentary, nostalgic without feeling the pain from an old wound.
