Beach music-- as we've come to know it in the indie rock sense anyway-- is typically described by a set of stock adjectives. It is almost always "sunny," frequently "bouncy," occasionally "sparkling," and composed of "shimmering" guitars and "warm" vocals. It is "fun," "upbeat," and "catchy." It might also be "melancholic," but with a kind of sweetness to it, like a high-school fling that's suddenly imbued with some great meaning once you hit 30. Above all, it is perceived meteorologically as much as sonically; if you happen to be among the millions of landlocked shlubs in the middle of the country, beach music is romantic escapism that's been highly seductive since at least the early 1960s. But what if you already live in a sun-drenched paradise dotted by beach balls and bonfires? Where do you escape to then? All that's left for you is a deep, dark ocean, where relentless tides stalk lonely stragglers and threaten to swallow them whole into bottomless depths.
At least that's the feeling you get listening to the music of San Diego's Andrew Caddick, who records as Jeans Wilder. Over several albums, including his new effort, Totally, and a smattering of 7" releases, Caddick has specialized in bummer summer jams for beach bums, adopting many of the same sonic tricks that bands like Real Estate, Beach Fossils, and DIIV have used to create much prettier records-- angular surf-guitar guitar lines, reverb-heavy "boy" vocals, understated-to-the-point-of-flatness rhythms-- and soaking them in disaffected darkness.
Only the weather is sunny in Jeans Wilder songs; the stuff inside is twisted and shadowy, and weighed down by unfulfilled hopes and dreams. Any meaning that can be gleaned from Caddick's murmured lyrics is spoken directly by the song titles: "Blue Dream", "Dog Years", "Evaporated", "Slow Burn". Caddick has seen the promised land and found it populated by failed actors and dead-eyed hippies passed out in the dunes. He's like Neil Young in the song "On the Beach": He lives in a place of sun and sand, "but those seagulls are still out of reach."
Actually, referring to the individual tracks on Totally as "songs" doesn't seem quite right. To paraphrase a line about Terry Valentine, the deeply tanned and shiny-toothed face of L.A.'s pitch-black soul in Steven Soderbergh's The Limey, they aren't specific enough to be songs-- they're more like a vibe. The opening track, "Blue Dream", floats some elegant keyboard tinkling over a bed of spooky wave crashes and howling wind gusts; it's as if the sun has set on mankind, not just southern California. From there, the sense of post-apocalyptic dread only grows*.* "Maple Bars" is a long, awkward amble with a sideways cowboy-song beat that evokes a barren spaghetti-western wasteland; "Limeade" is more wild-west stuff, nodding in the direction of Bakersfield honky-tonk, only with the swagger stripped out and replaced with post-punk clunking. Lest things get too down and out, a party threatens to break out on the frisky, syncopated "Evaporated"-- the album's most danceable song by many miles-- but the focus is put squarely on the socially anxious guitar chords strummed slowly and softly at a safe distance from the groove.
When Caddick manages to hit upon a solid melody or two, he can't be content with presenting beauty at face value. "Dog Years" could've potentially been his "Surfer Girl" moment, but he pours salt water on the melody and turns it into a coughing cacophony of fucked-up feeling. It's an effective evocation of a mood that Caddick is obsessed with conjuring throughout Totally, though this self-defeatism also results in a record that comes up short in overall form and substance. Caddick has shown us the seamy underbelly of beach culture; now he has to find a way to make it as alluring as the fantasy on the flipside.
