YACHT: SEE MYSTERY LIGHTS
[rating:4.5]
Yacht: See Mystery Lights
Label: Dfa Records
Release Date: July 28, 2009
See Mystery Lights, by YACHT (“Young Americans Challenging High Technology.” according to their Myspace page) is a strange and hypnotic mixed bag of charming synth sound and new age / DIY punk-mystic vision. This 10 track album (which is actually 8 tracks plus two “remixes”) delves humorously into the esoteric, emoting on the afterlife, heaven and hell, & voodoo over a range of handclaps, digitized vocal beats, and instantly catchy pop keyboard riffs. The innovation of See Mystery Lights is a sound that bends synthetic components to create an oddly organic, stripped-down experience (that you can dance to!). On first listen I felt like I had made little songs like this as a child just using my mouth to take words and stretch them and create beats such as in “Ring the Bell” where singer Jona Bechtolt takes the lyric “Fear in my heart” and turns it into “Fear in my heart-ar-ar-ar-art”.
As an idea, YACHT’s sound seems to be something of a zeitgeist. The band is definitely a product of and answer to the internet and digitial age; of being exposed to various cultural references, borrowing & updating ideas, collaging different, and somewhat opposing elements to create a new pop hybrid. Even their video for “Psychic City” seems to play on the idea of battling and uniting opposites. There are hints of artists such as Suicide, Yoko Ono, or Steve Reich who made/make use of technology and repetition and layering sounds to create avant garde collage-style music….this is a more “fun” dance version of some of their ideas. See Mystery Lights is great as a whole, but the two tracks that really first jumped out at me where “The Afterlife” & “Psychic City (Voodoo City)“. The Afterlife kicks right in with a nice drum track that sort of sounds like a handclap, a warm bass riff, and Claire L. Evans’s wonderfully, somewhat flat vocals (reminds me of Elastica’s “Connection” vocals), speak-singing romantic lyrics about “land of the empire builders”…..and from there the track moves along layering keyboards, effects, and a crunchy guitar to arrive at the insanely catchy chorus about “It’s not a place you go it’s a place that comes to you……..The Afterlife”. Basically, it gets trapped in your brain, and makes you want to sing/clap/dance along. The other standout track is the simple and charming “Psychic City (Voodoo city)“. Here, as before, the track opens with a hand clap drumbeat and Claire L. Evans’s speak singing about “living in a psychic city”…..the quiet verse builds into a standout, ecstatic chorus that layers both singers into a sort of tribal choir singing “IE IE YA YA” that, on it’s last reprise of the song, gets tossed over a strange keyboard riff that makes me think of eating in a chinese restaurant.
The key to YACHT‘s success with See Mystery Lights is repeated danceable rhythms, playful, melodic choruses, cool lyrics, and a touch of humor. Their sound embraces all the great parts about music, mixes it up, and offers something suprising and new. Enjoy.
– Joshua S. Amos
