YACHT I Believe In You: Your Magic Is Real by: Joseph Coscarelli Mon:18-Jun-07 Label: K Year: 2007 WB rating 34 out of 100

Jona Bechtolt is the kid armed with only quick clicking fingers and a laptop. But in a day and age where a world music drum circle erupts in seconds flat as a result of a built-in loop on your average home computer, point-and-click leads to band name, initiates music career, spawns albums. Not to say any bungling dolt is going to accidentally drop OK Computer 2.0, but high-horses be damned, bedrooms have become conducive to albums and you don't have to go by the name Steve Albini. The high-pressure, super speed tour de force, where Anton Newcombe bangs out Give It Back in one week single-handedly, while impressive, approaches commonplace in a world where stardom is kick-started with an unedited, 30-second blog flurry.  

Bechtolt's capacity to be the one-man-band-man behind YACHT comes endorsed with references and accolades, including a stint as Khaela Maricich's tech-savvy Garfunkel in The Blow (Bechtolt recently resigned to focus on YACHT full-time). Collaborations with Devendra Banhart, Mirah and the Microphones showed him as able-minded with an ear for groove, but Bechtolt proved his utility if only on The Blow's 2006 album Paper Television. On that record, he paved Maricich's path to our hearts with blips and beeps and buzzing whirrs catchy enough to hold discourse with the scene-stealing head starlet. On the latest YACHT record, I Believe In You: Your Magic Is Real, Bechtolt carries over The Blow's colon in the album title (Poor Aim: Love Songs?), but apparently couldn't bear to lift a weighty hook, take any cues on album cohesion, learn subtle humor or contract any of his partner's charm. Instead, we get a clumsy mess of half-baked indecision, waffling between bedroom, sample-based noodling and misguided attempts at overblown club bangers.  

Opening track 'So Post All 'Em' is promising enough, what with its counter-rhythmic dueling acoustic guitars that bob and weave in sneaky attack, its ping-pong back-beat and its hand percussion. The vocals are reserved and the lyrics simplistic but the muffled calls that pass from left speaker to right speaker and back again have a playful Animal Collective weirdness to them. And as Bechtolt starts his cutting and splicing, the tune actually picks up momentum culminating in an outro that sounds like alien abduction, high-pitched screeches in tow. 'See A Penny (Pick It Up)' takes an old adage, stop-and-go beat and video game sounds to the ends of a Blow-like jaunty number, with both distorted and airy synths fighting for space within the layers of the chorus. But the magic of Magic is short-lived, as Bechtolt seems to forget the type of record he wanted to make by the time track three rolls around, losing sight of the absurdity of laptop production. For the remainder of the record he falls into traps of pretension and haughtiness that should have never appeared an option. No one likes a preachy lap-popper, but what people can get behind is commitment and vision. Both are lacking here.  

'The Magic Beat' overreaches in a stab at becoming a speaker-shaker at your local bar's Indie Dance Night, but the graceless Tony Robbins catch-phrase of "Do what you love/ Love what you do," obscures any sense of reckless, lighthearted abandon. Like a high school guidance counselor hopped up on positivity throughout 'I Believe In You', Bechtolt persuades the listener to "buy a hot dog", "swim in a pond", or "climb a lamp post" as he praises the infinite nature of your magic, promising that you "can have the world for yourself." But these vapid and trite declarations leave a bad taste and sting with condescension. "Are we owned by our own stuff – all that stuff that costs too much?" he asks on 'We're Always Waiting', another instance of banal commentary spat with a smile that has the weight of a classroom poster of personal affirmations. Ventures into humor or irony fall familiarly flat as when Bechtolt asks about that "penis on your 'fridge door" and then claims it makes him "feel awkward." Awkward, really? Us, too, Jona, but that was all your doing.  

'Platinum' and 'It's All The Same Price', two successive tracks, take the tradition of Daft Punk as a literal reading, beginning with a singular repeated phrase in the vein of 'Around the World' but fail to use the process as a momentum building tool and instead just become grating. This conceit is all too common on Magic where a healthy and generally welcomed technique (feel-good lyrics, humor, and even more tangible lyrical phrasing) is reproduced in a shoddy, slapdash manner, breaking flows and loosing listeners at every turn. The most pressing example is the embarrassment titled 'Your Magic Is Real', a three-minute shout-out track of thanks, as Jay-Z did in the last two minutes of The Black Album or Lupe Fiasco dragged on for twelve-minutes in the falling action of Food and Liquor. Frivolous to be sure, but at least rap stars, with whom the tradition originated, are typically polite enough to clutter the album's very end with the list of name-drops. Bechtolt places his documented gratitude on Magic with two tracks remaining – just another example of the oblivion that carries throughout the record, resulting in a constant external struggle between producer and star, singer and beat-smith, dance floor and bedroom, and leaves a listener with disdain about the state of the do-it-yourself album.