And the song at No. 30 on our charts is a testament to the power of luck, love, and a lot of vocal manipulation.

In the months since YACHT’s “See A Penny, Pick It Up” lit up elbo.ws, entire swaths of blog-band terrain have been strip-mined. Hype cycles have whirled and stopped and kicked back into gear anew. And everyone’s seemingly given up to just go back to listening to Radiohead a lot. Yet this weird little ode to romance from Jona Bechtolt, who also created beats for the Blow’s better-with-each-listen Paper Television, has bobbed near the top of my iTunes playlist all year, its pitch-shifted vocals and stuttery rhythm kicking around my brain almost incessantly. Maybe it’s the fresh-faced lyrics, which provide a cautionary tale of what happens when you bet against love. (FYI: You lose a hundred bucks.) Maybe it’s the “‘Miss You’ and ‘Heartbeats’ knock boots” sound, because what’s sweeter than a song about love that sounds like it was the result of two fine tracks getting it on? Either way, “Penny” was a treat, a “blog song” that actually sounded like it could have been booming out of cars on one of those summer days when temperatures were so high, the whole world seemed warped.

YACHT – See A Penny (Pick It Up) [YouTube]
YACHT[MySpace]
Idolator’s 2007 Top 40 List Of Awesomeness
[Photo via Your Daily Awesome]