★★★★★
For a made-for-TV movie, Ladies and Gentleman, The Fabulous Stains is a surprisingly smart punk flick (featuring a very young Diane Lane and Laura Dern) that predicts the riot grrl movement. It chronicles the rise and fall of Lane 'n' Dern's band, the Fabulous Stains, and the impact their violent feminist music has on America's lady-youth...
- www.punknews.org
2011-11-17
★★★★★
Shangri-La is the second album featuring YACHT as an eclectic two-piece, and the fifth overall. As a follow up to their 2009 release, See Mystery Lights, Shangri-La is another highly danceable release loaded with electronic stomp and catchy rants. The idea that this is a concept album about Utopia and a Utopian society is an interesting move, but more importantly YACHT has given us another album to be categorized and filed under: FUN...
- www.culturebully.com
2011-10-03
★★★★★
Where does utopia end, and dystopia begin? What darkness lurks in the shadows and ignored corners of a Brave New World? Heady questions but YACHT are on the case with their fifth full-length album. Yet another victory for New York dance label DFA, this glistening and darkly slick electro-punk outing screams out loud its concept of perceived perfection in society with a ferocity that at times borders on stunning...
- www.beat.com.au
2011-08-22
★★★★★
It was only weeks ago that professional doomsday prophet Harold Camping got a bunch of fundamentalist Christians worked up by his declarations that the rapture would commence on 21 May 2011. While his prediction proved sadly unfounded, it hasn't stopped Claire L. Evans and Jona Bechtolt from constructing their new album around this very human obsession with attaining paradise...
- www.factmag.com
2011-08-15
★★★★★
What might one have to say On the Best State of an Album and on the YACHT Album of Utopia? Firstly, we can confound that solemn opening by noting that Shangri-La is a seriously funky work, combining irresistible indie tendencies and synth-electronica beats with intellectual smarts in a way that could give a whole new meaning to the term "intelligent dance music...
- www.tinymixtapes.com
2011-08-15
★★★★★
Following the release of See Mystery Lights (2009), I'd essentially written off YACHT as an overstretched Pacific Northwest community art project that somehow found its way onto DFA so it could take everything I hate about Pacific Northwest community art projects (ironic appropriation of mainstream R&B, too much whimsy, a general unshakeable feeling of being homemade in the worst way, poor approximations of dance music) and project them on a larger stage than anyone needed them to be on...
- www.cokemachineglow.com
2011-08-08
★★★★★
Find It At: Insound Here's YACHT, surfacing for another round on DFA, continuing roughly where they left off on 2009's See Mystery Lights, with the kind of stripped-down, danceable fare that made their move to DFA appropriate, and a continued/expanding salvo of cheeky, pseudo-cultish conceptualism...
- www.undertheradarmag.com
2011-08-01
★★★★★
Portland's Yacht (sometimes spelled YACHT) is either an electronic duo posing as a pop band, or a pop band posing as an electronic duo. At times they'll remind you of Marc Almond's Soft Cell and Midge Ure's Ultravox -- 10 tons of popped-collar sparkle and sheen wedged into a five-ton box. And at other times they go all Jenny Jenny who can I turn to? on you. It's almost like they don't believe in genres, these guys. Even weirder, as it says up there, they're from Portland...
- www.soundspike.com
2011-07-18
★★★★★
YACHT's second album as a duo, their fifth overall, fuses a utopian concept with the brand of nervy, spastic electro-funk we've come to expect from the DFA label. As on 2009's See Mystery Lights, Portland laptop maestro Jona Bechtolt (formerly of the Blow) and singer Claire L...
- pitchfork.com
2011-07-11