A comment on this week's Best of 2008 column:

wtf grandy? no YACHT? you fail.
Posted by YACHT CLUB

First of all, we're all informal friends on the internet, right? Addressing people by only their last names makes one sound like a gym teacher.

Second, I assume we're talking about YACHT's sole 2008 release, "Summer Song," (although I guess we could also be talking about his early '08 work designing manilla envelope sleeves for the then new macbook air), which song was "originally recorded as a love letter to tourmates LCD Soundsystem," according to press materials that also state, "YACHT is as surprised as you are that DFA wanted to release the song."

I'll post the video of the song below, and it is a pretty great, home-grown-in-Portland video [update: Jason Josephes points out that said video is a nod to Tapeheads, which I deeply regret having still not seen in 2008], with its comically amateur video director within the video literally throwing everything at YACHT that his non-existent budget allows in an attempt to make them more (exciting?) than they are, hoping that something sticks, and actually kind of neon tar-and-feathering them in the process.

But I didn't put the song in my Best of 2008 clusterfuck, because, really I maybe listened to it once in 2008 before preparing this post. It just didn't do it for me (and, also, I've just heard the sinlge and not the b-sides). I definitely hear the love letter to Sound of Silver angle in the bass, the "live"/acoustic percussion, the reverby vocals, but to me it all lands more as pastiche than homage—it's YACHT got innocuous. (As a side note, YACHT's "Platinum" and LCD's "Get Innocuous" have almost the exact same synth groove.) Listening to it again, it's a fine enough summery dance jam, and it's growing on me even, but I still don't quite yet buy YACHT as this cool, collected repeater of dance floor mantras as opposed to his old overenthusiastic spaz, but maybe I'll be better convinced by their forthcoming album, See Mystery Lights, in 2009.