YACHT: See Mystery Lights

Bric-a-brac beats arranged into lattices, juicy hooks delivered in deadpan, good-natured winks at B-boy rap and post-punk: YACHT’s appeal isn’t hard to understand. Jona Bechtolt’s songwriting methods are tougher to fathom, though. Naming your album’s only love song “I’m In Love With A Ripper” is one thing; deciding to make it sound like a mash-up of Nine Inch Nails’ “Down In It” and T-Pain is another. It’s not too much of a shock that YACHT’s arrangements are inventive and ear-pleasing: Bechtolt provided the music for The Blow’s excellent Paper Television in 2006, and YACHT’s single “See A Penny Pick It Up” was one of the most addictive songs of 2007. More remarkable is how many cues Bechtolt seems to have taken from former tourmate and new labelmate LCD Soundsystem. “It’s Boring/You Can Live Anywhere You Want” takes two separate stabs at a “Yeah”-style barnburner, while nearly every track channels Sound Of Silver by trying to inject some poignancy into the dance party. But while James Murphy usually grapples with human loss, Bechtolt and singer Claire Evans ponder the moral physics of heaven, hell, voodoo, and downloading. Like the music beneath, the words are heady and accessible, leaning slightly toward the former. With some emotional rejiggering, YACHT could end up recording its own tweaked-out punk-funk classic.