YACHT Rock

Laptop stars get joyful and destructive

A A A Comments By Zach Baron Tuesday, Apr 25 2006

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.

photo: Shiho Fukada

Rock stars, populists, or just super-happy guys.

Details

Bobby Birdman + YACHT + E*Rock
Cake Shop
April 16

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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.

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