After interviewing the two core members of YACHT about fringe religions, the abstract (yet identifiable) meaning of triangles, and the punk rock nature of creating your own symbols, I left the Pyramid to meet up with friends, and came back well in time to catch locals Not Animals play to a mostly-seated crowd.
They started off tame, but the boys loosened up throughout their set and started rocking their proto-shoegaze guitar riffs (à la Jesus & the Mary Chain) and powerfully hushed vocals to draw at least a dozen people nearer to the stage. The new faces in the crowd were digging it, either bopping their heads along or slowly moving their hips. The build of their last song “Light at Night” was a powerful contradiction of rocking your face off with guitars, keyboards, and glockenspiel, but singer Chris Samms still maintained his sentimentality.
Next up was Bobby Birdman, who plays in YACHT’s backing band the Straight Gaze, but is a wonderful singer in his own right. He greeted the crowd with a simple yet aerobatic line of “Hello, Hello, oh Winnipeg, Hello,” and encouraged everyone to move closer and sing along, which most people did. After salutations, Jeffrey Jerusalem, the other half of the Straight Gaze, started drumming for Bobby, doing these propulsive, nearly funky beats–which, with Bobby’s beautifully arcing melodies, made for a combination that sounded like black and pastel. For a few songs Bobby Birdman picked up his guitar or played the synthesizer onstage, but mostly he held the microphone at the very front of the stage and jerked himself around like a ’90s pop star. With nothing other than drums, it was kinda weird, but the crowd still stuck around.
Then, after some lengthy DJing by Mike B., the crowd was psyched. The Straight Gaze took the stage again, but this time in tuxes. A pervertedly slow version of Giorgio Moroder’s “Chase” played through the speakers, Claire L. Evans, gothed out in black, and Jona Bechtolt, decked out in white, launched themselves onto stage, did one brief round of the macarena to the beat, and they all launched into a hyper-energetic version of “Ring the Bell.” The singers really threw themselves into the song; Bechtolt took his white microphone off the white microphone stand and swung it around by its white cord, and Evans fell to her knees, looked to the sky, and clasped her hands around her microphone in prayer, singing about an afterlife that wasn’t heaven or hell.
Maybe the vocals weren’t as professional as on the record, or as other bands, but YACHT consider themselves punks, and from the end of the carpet on, it was quite the party. The data projector screened YACHT’s triangles and power-to-the-people slogans, broken by Evans and Bechtolt running back and forth across the stage, making spastic (but thought-out) dance moves to the prerecorded percussion and arpeggios. Yeah, symbology, costumes, prerecorded beats, sloganeering–this all sounds like it’d be one hell of a pretentious time. It might’ve been, maybe if Bechtolt and Evans weren’t so warm and welcoming to the crowd. They closed their set with the classic “Psychic City (Voodoo City),” which almost the entire crowd jumped around and sang to. I turned around, ready to go, because they’d played the entirety of See Mystery Lights, but they jumped back onstage pretty quickly to play their cover of the Fabulous Stains’ guitar-driven “Waste of Time.” After that, they ran to the merch table, enthusiastically staying and talking to fans.
Be sure to check out the interview with YACHT in the April/May issue of Stylus!