Do You Believe in Magic?

The lights that lend Portland electro pop duo YACHT’s new
album its name, See Mystery Lights, have been appearing just
east of Marfa, Texas—a small town turned artists’ retreat in the
high West Texan desert (where both No Country for Old Men and
There Will Be Blood were partially filmed)—since at least
1957, although reports published at that time cited anecdotal accounts
tracing the lights as far back as the 1800s.

The lights occur at night, reportedly appearing as glowing spheres
of varying colors which hover, dancing side to side, disappearing and
reappearing, splitting and merging in the dark distance (the terrain
over which the lights appear is, of course, both difficult to traverse
and private property). In video footage posted to YouTube, they look
like blurry, flickering, far-off headlights. Skeptics suggest that the
lights could be mirages caused by high-altitude collisions of hot and
cold air, or headlights reflecting from nearby US Route 67, or
naturally occurring piezoelectricity given off by quartz rocks (sort
of, but not exactly, like how wintergreen Lifesavers spark if you bite
into them). Whether you’re inclined to see the lights in terms of
rational, scientific explanations or as an otherworldly, supernatural,
and ultimately unexplainable phenomenon probably says something about
how you’ll react to YACHT.

That’s because while YACHT’s music and live show are straightforward
enough—glitchy synth pop and disco funk, singing and dancing
along to backing tracks—the aura created by their lyrics and
extracurricular effluvia can ask rather a lot. Just how much
quasi-mystical optimism can you accept?

According to their online mission statement, “YACHT is a Band,
Belief System, and Business conducted by Jona Bechtolt and Claire L.
Evans of Marfa, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, USA. All people are
welcome to become members of YACHT.” (More prosaically, YACHT began in
the early 2000s as the solo electronic project of Bechtolt, who has
also recorded with the Blow and other artists, and expanded to include
Evans in 2008.)

The act’s breakout 2007 album is called I Believe in You. Your
Magic Is Real (an encouragement lifted from the late Michael
Jackson’s endorsement of street magician David Blaine), and its title
track contains the chorus, “Your magic’s real, so why aren’t you using
it?/You could have the world for yourself/You don’t ever have to worry
about losing it/The magic inside of you is infinite.” At live shows
supporting that record, Bechtolt was prone to giving motivational
sermons between songs and hugging audience members. See Mystery
Lights ups the ante from an affirmation to an imperative; YACHT
don’t just believe—in you, in an afterlife, in West Texan
will-o’-the-wisps—they want you to believe.

And what does YACHT believe exactly? The mission statement
continues: “YACHT is about group consciousness. YACHT is about the
individual man or woman. If you believe these assertions to be
contradictory, consider the Triangle: It is both a collection of points
and a shape… YACHT believes all things, hopes all things, has endured
many things, and hopes to be able to endure all things… YACHT seeks
to explore frontiers and to expand awareness of extraterrestrial
Intelligence—which is not only real but necessary… YACHT
believes ‘Free Wi-Fi’ is not an advertisement of services, but a
political statement.”

See Mystery Lights starts right in with the heavy stuff. On
album opener “Ring the Bell,” Bechtolt asks, over a light, tropical
guitar and a steam-building beat, “Will we go to heaven or will we go
to hell?” He answers, backed by a chorus of what sounds like his own
pitch-shifted voice(s), “It’s my understanding that neither are real.”
On the next track, “The Afterlife,” Evans, singing in a kind of
possessed deadpan over echoing percussion, explains, “It’s not a place
you go/it’s a place that comes to you/and it’s not about who you
know/or who is in your heart.” (From that mission statement: “YACHT
believes in an Afterlife. YACHT does not believe in ‘Heaven,’ or
‘Hell.'”)

In the second portion of “It’s Boring/You Can Live Anywhere You
Want”—which follows a first part whose chorus is less Buzzcocks
than it is “Nothing Ever Happens on Mars”—Evans recites a list of
(oh) the places you’ll go: the city, the woods, the desert, the beach,
a small town, a cave, underwater. It suggests a kind of limitless,
fantastic mobility unfettered by real-world problems.

These songs seem typical of YACHT’s attitude toward mundane material
concerns, an air somewhere between detached amusement and lofty
disregard. In real life, Bechtolt attracted some minor controversy by
admitting to using pirated audio production software, for which he
vaguely apologized but also offered some utopian futurist “stuff wants
to be free” justifications (the makers of one of these pieces of
software, in an open letter to Bechtolt, countered that, in fact, their
labor didn’t want to be free so much as it wanted to be remunerated).
So maybe YACHT’s not so bothered by worries about making a living or
finding a place to live, which makes sense for a pair of artists who
winter in Marfa and get by making designer MacBook sleeves and posing
for Converse ads, but might not be so reassuring to some listeners.

(The piracy issue and its fallout are also illustrative of another
of YACHT’s key traits, a kind of unguarded openness of communication
that allows for and isn’t afraid of mistakes but which can also
sometimes seem like a kind of emptiness, a refusal to come to solid
conclusions—a recent blog post contains the nonjudgmental credo,
“There is value in all ideas.”)

Other songs on See Mystery Lights are more broadly upbeat.
The back-to-back tracks that form the album’s core, “Psychic City
(Voodoo City)” and “Summer Song,” are both outstanding, maybe the two
best songs YACHT’s ever done. “Psychic City,” which was originally
written by Rich Jensen (Sub Pop, Up Records, Clear Cut Press), is an
ode to an unreal place where you “never knew what might happen in a
day,” where you might “fall in love every minute on the street.”
YACHT’s take has Evans singing the lyrics over a gently swinging bass
guitar line, bubble-popping percussion modeled after an IM sound
effect, and a chorus marked by handclaps and bright, open guitar
chords.

“Summer Song” is a love letter not just to the season, but also to
DFA Records boss James Murphy, whose LCD Soundsystem took YACHT out on
a profile-boosting tour in 2007 and whose label is now releasing See
Mystery Lights. The song is a conscious and fairly convincing
imitation as flattery, with hand percussion echoing over a steady
rocking disco beat, a walking bassline, synths squealing in time
between the beats, and Bechtolt and Evans uttering repetitive dance
floor commands (“move your feet to the Summer Song”).

It seems impossible that anyone could really be so optimistic about
everything (and unlikely that the members of YACHT sincerely believe in
triangle energy or the paranormal or whatever). Sometimes it’s easier
to sympathize with someone singing you their woes than it is to feel
inspired by someone telling you that everything is going to be all
right (“Things Are Gonna Get Easier” might be a fine song, but it
doesn’t actually convince me of anything).

And yet, listening to See Mystery Lights, by far YACHT’s
finest and poppiest record to date, can make even the most hardhearted
cynic want to believe. If there’s some tongue in cheek to
YACHT’s magically positive mental attitude or their stated ideals (and,
I mean, their manifesto ends with the important pronouncements, “YACHT
will never participate in ‘flame war’ culture. YACHT is not a cult.”),
then it’s just enough to make them seem goofy and human, and the
delivery is still heartfelt enough to hit its mark. Hell, even if
you’re a serious doubter, it’s still a fun album. You don’t have to
believe in the lights to like how they look.