Dancing At The Blue Lagoon

The new album from Californians Cayucas. While their sun-drenched, jangly, sometimes melancholic sound is quintessentially Californian, the album is very much their personal 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. You can hear it loud and clear in the easygoing confidence throughout on the crisp, backbeat-driven "Hella" or as "Moony Eyed Walrus" takes surf guitar into fragmented, unpredictable places. The impossibly catchy and heartbreaking "Backstroke" is a Murakami-inspired detective story, neo-noir that is equal parts stylization and gut-level emotion.

"Dancing at the Blue Lagoon" is all about a band testing its comfort zone and asking us to do the same. "Big Winter Jacket" is a world away from sun-kissed pop, with acoustic guitars that build into something grand and expansive. The after-hours piano ballad "Ditches," like much of Dancing at the Blue Lagoon, takes pop conventions and digs into them. Like the Beach Boys of Sunflower or Surf's Up, it reminds us that sadness and uncertainty are never far from the surface, even in Cayucas's most carefree moments. It casts some like the title track - "Dancing at the Blue Lagoon",a lilting tropical fantasia - in an entirely different light.