Yacht - I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler

Yacht
I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler
2015

The resurgence of the 80s in recent years has meant from some intensely good electro-pop and synths making their way back into the rotation. It has produced some really good music full of bright tones and some darker themes being explored. It has also lead to some quite generic, completely overdone bullshit. Yacht falls somewhere in the middle of that. Their writing is actually pretty stellar, in an almost David Byrne type of social commentary way. This album I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler is focused almost entirely on the future and the underwhelming nature of the present. The sounds beneath the words however follows almost cookie cutter with post-disco dance tracks. It is almost a travesty to have some of these words over this music, they don't fit together and when they do it is because Claire Evans (the lead singer) is just saying ringtone and phone over and over. When the lyrics are dumbed down the whole song suffers, when the lyrics are elevated the track sounds clunky and mismatched.

On "I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler" Evans speaks out against EDM "cults" and gun violence, but then at the same time she is putting out a very clear dance track. The message gets mixed up in the delivery and then is lost. Instead of her rallies against violence, inequality or the dumbing down of culture just become someone yelling down a hall than making a statement. This record should have been an essay (Evans is a writer for VICE) not a disco album. Your cries for social justice get lost when you sing a hook over and over again until it is beaten to death. I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler has an interesting take on culture and music in general, it just is not one that is very good. There will undoubtedly be people who claim is record is genius, but it is just a practice in wanting to look cool, which this album really is not. This record is an easy miss.

5.2  out of 10