Down and ditty
Down and Yacht's whimsical pop songs belie something more cerebral, writes Madeline Gressel
"If I can't go to heaven, let me go to LA, or the far West Texas desert, or an Oregon summer day," runs the jubilant refrain of Yacht's 2011 bubbly single Shangri -La.
It's an apt line. The song paints an agreeably concise picture of the band's history - their past, present and future, in a literal and spiritual sense.
Yacht, an acronym for "young Americans challenging high technology", is an indie-pop outfit based in Portland, Oregon, that began as the brainchild of Jona Bechtolt. In 2008, he was joined by Claire L. Evans, after her band opened for Yacht at a gig in Los Angeles.
"It was collaboration at first sight," Evans says ahead of Yacht's Hong Kong appearance on May 15. "I was a huge fan of his. After that gig, the band I was in at the time actually had a meeting about how to be more like Yacht. [Jona] was so interesting, weird and visually engaging. He was doing performance art using only a computer. I had never seen that.
"If I had only known that a few years later I would be in the band," she says. "It wasn't intentional manipulation, but it ended up that way."
Both musicians were raised in Portland, live in Los Angeles, and consider the Texas town of Marfa to be their "spiritual home". "These three places come together to form what we lovingly refer to as the 'Western American Utopian Triangle'," Yacht says. Which goes a way towards explaining the Shangri-La refrain.
But there's more to Yacht than meets the ear. Ostensibly, Yacht is a band. Or is it? In a mission statement posted on their website, Yacht describe themselves as "a band, belief system and business". It's a surprisingly ponderous description, considering the band's colourful, dancey indie-pop tunes that have won them touring slots with the likes of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem and Vampire Weekend.