« Parenthetical Girls show us the dark, dirty and beautiful spaces in between | Main | Reggie Fils-Aime: Executive of the Year »
YACHT Rock
Laptop stars get joyful and destructive
by Zach Baron of the Village Voice
Cake Shop's "God rave"--so dubbed, Easter Sunday, by YACHT's Jona Bechtolt--was only the most right-now lie (show was not a rave) told by the three brothers-in-laptop (YACHT, Bobby Birdman, E*Rock) present. Other fiction included fake dates on the back of the tour shirt ("Praha" was a larf); E*Rock's originals, written variously by Yaz, Soft Cell, and whoever he ripped his "fight fight fight for your fanta-sy" bit from; and Bobby Birdman's chest-sized dreamcatcher. The inordinate amount of time the trio spent running in and out of the crowd? Less a lie than true two ways: Dudes were rock stars or populists, depending on which end of the jog they were on.
Like a wised-up SNL-night Ashlee Simpson, YACHT and co.'s DIY-meets-computers-meets-rap--they too mostly danced to prerecorded tracks--looked to capture the audience's heart by lying to us: to be onstage and bad at it at the same time. YACHT sang "Drawing in the Dark"--"Why would you be drawing in the dark/When you could be drawing in the light?"--with untouched markers in front of him, a dare nobody took 'cause he didn't really want them to. He also smashed his laptop screen, by accident. Broken, pixels everywhere, it looked just like the stage's back wall, on which the letters Y.A.C.H.T. were colorfully projected.
Birdman, closing the show, used a great smarmy lounge-singer voice to instead tell jokes about a washed-up Swedish entertainer he saw singing identical "get high on hope" schlock over and over different tracks of Mortal Kombat techno. When he himself finally crooned, you wondered about Bobby's own fate: The joke was on us, sure, but on him too.
Comments
Yeah, I feel like he didn't enjoy the show, but maybe he thought it was good anyway? The "lie" thing is a weird hang up, it's a performance... Imagine a reviewer saying that a film was full of lies because it was fiction. That's just silly.
Posted by: Mikey at May 3, 2006 1:45 PM
so deeply Christgau in its utter incomprehensibliity
Posted by: Kevin Erickson at May 3, 2006 9:39 PM
Yeah, dude seems sad or something. Anyway, the photo is really great! Check out Mumbleboy's Flick of the article in print:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mumblion/142005890/
Posted by: Jona at May 7, 2006 1:18 PM
this is the second thing i've read by this dude that is incredibly confusing and sounds like he likes to be really contradictory with himself to be "interesting"
Posted by: Steve Schroeder at May 3, 2006 1:17 PM