Chicago – I’m going to start out this review by giving YACHT some of the highest praise possible (in my book) for a band – they made going out on a Tuesday night worth it.
The night got off to a rocky start – local Chicago opener Cains and Abels took the stage at Lincoln Hall promptly at 8:00 and while they played a solid set, there wasn’t much that the eleven of us in the audience could really do to show our appreciation. Somehow applause and whistles from eleven people sounds more like sarcasm than anything else – sorry guys.
By the time Extreme Animals came on at 9:00 the place was starting to fill up a little. Extreme Animals is composed of two guys, both sporting long locks, one very stoically playing an electric guitar that brings to mind Spinal Tap, and the other auto-tuning covers of a very eclectic mix of covers (my concert companion very aptly dubbed them as Weird Al Yankovic meets Girl Talk, but not necessarily in a good way). Bizarre and slightly creepy images of dismembered hands sifting through sand and melting faces play in the background, and at the climax of the show two three tiered pumpkins inflate on stage – they even have names, (one was Never4Get, and I completely forget the name of the second one). It was a little trippy, a little unpleasant, a little catchy, and a little funny. I have to say my favorite was their last one, which was a mash-up of the Harry Potter theme song and Christine O’Donnell’s “I am not a Witch” campaign commercial.
At 10:30 YACHT came out (I was impressed to see that at this point the place was filled. Shout-out to Chicagoans coming out in force on a szuper cold Tuesday night in the name of good music!). The band came on stage and immediately started rockin’ out, no chit-chat. This is definitely a band that sounds better live than recorded. They’ve got an energy that comes across in person that doesn’t quite make it on youtube. You could make the direct comparison because their music videos were playing in the background. I’m not sure why they bothered – it was way more fun to watch lead singer Claire Evans busting out her dance moves. The woman had impressive stamina – she spent a solid hour and a half jumping, wiggling and generally rockin’ out, onstage, offstage, in the audience and even on top of the sound system at one point. That would have made a Tuesday night concert worth it in and of itself but YACHT also sounded fantastic, and they were obviously in tune with the crowd. Clear crowd favorites Summer Song, Psychic City, The Afterlife, Tripped and Fell in Love, definitely got the audience moving and they saved Shangri-La for their single-song encore. There was a powerpoint mid-concert where the audience was told that the event would be split into three acts, starting with an introduction that necessitated the entire audience humming together as one, blah blah blah, but even the band forgot about this unnecessary component once they got rolling, and they never actually made it to act three – we were all too engrossed in the music to care.
Yacht – Psychic City by SDP
