YACHT – Hoxton Bar & Kitchen, London 26/0711

If you use a backing track then you’re not really playing live. Sounds dumb when you write it down, but it’s an ideology a lot of gig-goers still have pinned to the backs of their tiny minds.

I first saw YACHT a few years ago in a small Cardiff venue. Back then, it was just Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans and they sang to track, morphed their vocals and fell across the low stage in a series of knee-busting shapes. It wasn’t so much the music that got me hooked but was the way they interacted with the audience, shouting for questions, touring Google maps, and Skyping a friend’s cat. It was warm, involving, and impossible to hate.

This time last year, the band were back with an album on DFA and a UK tour in support of LCD Soundsystem. The venues were big, the crowds unfamiliar and the chance to connect more difficult. A backing band joined them but the performance didn’t quite translate.

And now it’s tonight and the awesome new record Shangri-La is lodged into the subconscious of anyone with a soul and working set of ears. YACHT take to the Hoxton Bar & Grill stage in front of a sea of sweating fans. The venue is like a sauna and it only gets worse as the band launch into a set full of new album material.

‘Dystopia’ gets a roar, while ‘Paradise Engineering’ kick starts a crowd of eager fists skyward. Dressed tightly in white, Evans proclaims, “If you want me to be your friend, I will be your friend/But if you want me to be your God, yeah I will be your GOD.”

Old single ‘Summer Song’ sees Bechtolt and Evans on simultaneous vocal and dance duties but it’s the drop in ‘Beam Me Up’ that rips through the venue’s collective feet and sees the air turn into nothing but oxygen and the perspiration of others.

Their backing band are accomplished and included in the between song banter, even sharing the mic on tracks. Questions are still taken, and there’s even a map of America shown. For all their kitsch, YACHT are on form in and out of song, and as the set closes on See Mystery Lights classic ‘Psychic City’ every mouth in the room joins the chorus, before pleading for an encore that has the band tackle a shaky but all too charming cover of Judas Priest’s ‘Breaking The Law’.

Tonight feels like YACHT have come into their own; Confident and charismatic, they deliver both in personality and sound leaving anyone who questioned the musicianship of this band in the very obvious wrong.