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YACHT - See Mystery Lights
| Rollingstone |
| For YACHT's fourth album (and first for dance label DFA), the brainy duo — hot-shit remixer Jona Bechtolt and singer/science writer Claire Evans — holed up in a thrown-together studio in rural West Texas and ended up with what might be their breakthrough record. Both melodic and fashionably electro, See Mystery Lights runs precisely programmed digital ear candy through a Talking Heads-ish art-pop sensibility, tossing in congas, Afropop chords and loads of synth squiggles. Bechtolt and Evans get credit for truth in advertising: The throbbing singalong "Summer Song" will sound killer bumping from ad-hoc porch discos during the coming months....full text |
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| Dustedmagazine |
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It’s really difficult to find fault with the music on Jona Bechtolt’s latest album as Yacht, See Mystery Lights. Not because it’s particularly creative or groundbreaking or catchy, but rather because it was made for such a specific context that judging it out of that context makes little sense. Lights certainly has its charms – cribbed Afropop, bits like A Rainbow in Curved Air, and a general poppy through-line – but those charms wear thin when placed up against an entire album’s worth of monotonous, mobius strip dance beats. Perhaps Bechtolt and his new music partner Claire Evans didn’t mean for this to be specifically for indie dance parties, but that’s what Lights is, and in that respect, it works quite well. It’s repetitive enough to get people into a rhythm; the beats do what they are supposed to do, and one can picture an entire living room’s worth of kids in fake Indian apparel jumping up and down drunkenly to “It’s Boring/You Can Live Anywhere You Want.”...full text |
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| Residentadvisor |
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Only when you've spent the last seven years as half of K Records quirky, what-the-shit duo The Blow can an album like Jona Bechtolt's latest, See Mystery Lights, seem, well, kind of like a pop record. It's not that Bechtolt's swallowed his grin; it's that he's finally set it to quick bursts of kiddie anthem that allow the listeners to give or take his wit as the mood takes them (lesson: zany quasi-spiritual quests and lyrics about paranormal-light phenomenon are best swallowed with a well-cut groove). After the Portland-based Bechtolt released a few indie-electronic records solo as YACHT on small backyard labels like States Rights Records and Marriage, See Mystery Lights is YACHT's debut for DFA Records and first as a duo, enlisting Claire L. Evans as lead for his eccentric, beat-based pop songs. More importantly, it's YACHT's sharpest, slickest record yet and one of the DFA's more instantaneous records of the last several years. First, though, a too-perfect backstory. "Summer Song," the most immediate cut on See Mystery Lights, began as a coy love letter to DFA-chair James Murphy. Frankly, cute anecdote or not, it's easy to understand how Murphy might have heard a kissing-cousin of sorts with his own often sardonic dance gems over the years. For the most part, YACHT combine the catchy and the archly self-aware without dipping into the distance of the in-joke; if cheeky, their wild thrusts still sound inclusive, inviting. With bass notes that sound tumbled from strings of vulcanized rubber, slow, singeing effects and whirring ghost-hall vocals, "Summer Song" sounds prepackaged as its own DFA remix, a riot of dulled, sun-worn senses....full text |
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