Yahoo! Music Review

Gig played on 28/08/08

Jona Bechtolt is a fantastic dancer. Not that the 27-year-old seems to specialise in any particular style. His is a kind of solo maniac robot polka, unsuitable for the ballroom but not really for the average club, either, such leaping too boisterous, you fear, for the average drunken temper, the risk of glass shards swiftly embedded like so many windows into the meat around one's skull.

The sound of breaking glass greets the demise of every song here this evening, YACHT using it in the same way that Radio 1 berk Tim Westwood does, tracks like "See A Penny" and "Summer Song" are bricks hurled through windows, Molotov cocktails exploding upon impact. One look at how the duo set up though (Bechtolt is joined, as usual, by girlfriend Claire L. Evans) is enough to betray the irony of that aggro. Prop-less, besides the odd laptop and effects pedal, the pair want to make friends not victims, charming the audience with PowerPoint presentations, impromptu Q&A sessions and, of course, the DIY dance movements mentioned earlier.

Musically, YACHT groove on borrowed samples, typically reworking them into either the type of disco that recently saw them signed to DFA or a modest update on grunge, which cuts the fuzz for something leaner, cuter, more pop. That's not to say these tunes lack fire - they all bubble over with an ill-contained glee - but despite the pure pop quality of "I'm in Love With a Ripper" and set highlight "You Can Live Anywhere You Want", what really ties tonight together is what goes on beyond and in between the dancing. The ICA, with its cinema screens and art galleries, fits for a band that are more than a musical project. YACHT are also, by turns, stand-up comedians, conceptual performance artists, self-help directors, tech-geeks and slackers.

Those last two identities are most pertinent - in 2008 YACHT's indie-disco gives the lie to the rapidly-rotting Ed Banger variant which assumes people spend their time getting brain blown in the Parisian catacombs on drugs no-one knows the names of yet. Most people don't though, do they? Yahoo! Music would rather bet you're more likely to be found in front of a screen at work or at home, trying to bend a sh*tty computer to your will.

With constant allusions to the internet, illegal downloading and one instance of the dreaded, fabled 'blue screen of death' (a scripted interruption that allows a bearded guy named Steve to join the party on video chat) YACHT pedal a new, inverse kind of social realism for the (ugh) digital generation. They're unreal, really.

by Kev Kharas