YACHT
See Mystery Lights
YACHT mastermind Jona Bechtolt ran into two pieces of rough trade this year, the first being when he sat down for an interview and admitted to using pirated software to create much of his recent work. Putting himself in the ranks of the unknown thousands who had downloaded pirated copies of this, his first major release since he dropped the girlfriend-pleaser Paper Television under the Blow moniker, may not have done him any favors with software makers, but his foolish admission had nothing on the sneer-inducing claim regarding what the name YACHT stood for. (One more time, that's "Young Americans Challenging High Technology", and if you're wondering what the burning sensation is, wonder no longer. You just dropped a lit cigarette on your crotch.) Bringing dormant designer Boyd Elder out of retirement for the album art may have repaired the breach with some, as long as they didn't mind the cornea damage that the eventual design provided.
Erasing the music out of the musician equation isn't a new phenomenon, and it would be a lengthy exaggeration to claim that the opening of communication between artist and listener (cum Myspace, cum Facebook, cum et all) has made the sound irrelevant. But the success of DFA releases with the "I've never met James Murphy" majority, combined with the success that so many DFA artists have had to reach an audience beyond the bandwidth obsessives make a good case for what the future of electronic based sounds can entail. They'll make the albums, but we'll take the singles--and more often than not, we'll take them after the likes of DJ /rupture and Murphy get finished mixing them with something else. (Look for 2010 to be the year that Kompakt puts out an anthology disc with no artists listed whatsoever.)
Jona's "I'm a big fan" response wasn't to contruct the most innovative piece of electro-pop, but that's not a black mark--indeed, it's a flashing light, a sign that said "you've always liked this before, and I'm pretty sure you'll like it again." Poppy, playful and direct, See Mystery Lights behaved like the soundtrack for a bunch of Daft Punk robots hanging at a LCD Soundsystem house party--looped, synthetic percussion wrapped around repetitive vocals, most of which sound like they could've been improvised while protooling with protools, all in the service of a circular, throbbing heart constructed out of, of course, the bass. On it's best tracks, Jona and Claire Evans construct sterilized pop, an extremist answer to the noise of human beings, and like Kelley Polar's I Need You To Hold Me While The Sky Is Falling, See Mystery Lights would be happiest soundtracking your sex life, as long as you're willing to have sex inside a jump cut, while drinking. But hiding at the center of "Summer Song", a handclap ode to the boredom of the long-term clubgoer (and their savior, James Murphy himself), there's a sense of encroaching doom, of age, of a wearied disgust. Everything that's supposed to be in it is there--the clapping, the muffled female vocals, the steam-cleaned bass--in its proper place. But as it goes on, Evans constant "move your feet to the summer song" eventually tricks out bit of a scream, and one starts to wonder, as the vocalist has--is this it? Another pop song? Another easy-to-make-yours life, one that's trapped in the cycle of same old, same old that every new musical trend promises a way out of?
Bechtolt doesn't answer the question, he just poses it. Thirty seconds of perfunctory (meaning the same, but also meaning satisfying) pop later, he cuts it off, and we're on to more. But for a second, hiding amidst all the simple pleasures, he seems to realize that he might be just a little bit too good for this.
At least he's remembering to have fun.
-Tucker Stone, 2009
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