Music Box | Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Mike Newmark Arts Editor

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Some Loud Thunder
[self-released; 2007]

Around the time when Sony was caught giving Hawaiian vacations to radio programmers for airplay, underdog Brooklyn quintet Clap Your Hands Say Yeah dropped their eponymous debut like an atom bomb into a cynical musical landscape. They recorded, produced, and released the album themselves, and their popularity came not from elaborate press kits, but from sincere bloggers who believed that they had found the band that would save rock. Heady praise, sure, but Clap Your Hands Say Yeah was still a fantastic record that was DIY in spirit yet refused to cut corners. The band’s story became one of indie purity surmounting corporate corruption, and it proved that music could succeed on its own merits. Wasn’t this how it was always supposed to work?

The quick follow-up, Some Loud Thunder, adds a less savory installment to the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah saga, in which our heroes find themselves trapped in the gaping jaws of the Hype Monster. How they ended up there isn’t really their fault; it’s simply the curse of incredible debut albums, whereby the band in question can either create magic twice or lurch earthward with overambition, insecurity or misguided directions. Some Loud Thunder clearly does the latter, but even without its precedent the album is a mess, both sonically and structurally. Making little effort to streamline their songs, the band instead throws every studio trick in the book at the wall in the vain hope that something will stick. Of their two records, this is the one that actually sounds self-produced.

For example, my first experience with this album naturally began with the first song, “Some Loud Thunder,” an upbeat jangle-pop number puzzlingly riddled with a low, flatulent rumble. Bewildered, I played another song in my library to check if my speakers were the problem (they weren’t), then opened an iTunes sample to hear if the fidelity differed (it didn’t). The point is that I shouldn’t have to take such ridiculous measures for music in this vein, but the album is saddled with—and consequently defined by—these amateurish production-related missteps. For proof, look anywhere: keyboards badger the surrounding instruments, whiny vocals pile atop other whiny vocals, guitars screech then turn to lead, accordions die. When I listen to “Mama, Won’t You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning?”, I imagine how Animal Collective could have given it some life. And hey, wasn’t “In This Home on Ice” (from their debut) one of the most luscious indie pop productions this side of the millennium? What happened?

A sudden shot of fame may not always cause a band to become nervous. Sometimes the opposite effect occurs, wherein the band members feel content to rest on their laurels and record an inferior version of their breakthrough. In other words, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah got lazy and made the same album twice, only flatter, blockier and more joyless. “Yankee Go Home” and “Arm and Hammer” are the worst offenders; the former is a lugubrious trawl through blues-rock territory that lumbers out of the speakers with a jaded sneer, while the latter is a poorly mixed acoustic pseudo-song with the whiff of a Sebadoh b-side. For a man who sounds like a whiny Jeff Magnum, vocalist Alec Ounsworth sings with odd resignation, as though he couldn’t care less about his own tunes. I don’t blame him.

Even the album’s bright spots speak more to the band’s former glory than to any forward progression. The driving rhythms and vintage space-age effects of “Satan Said Dance” give the album a much-needed boost, but what is that song if not a bleepier, less melodic cousin of “Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood”? The title track is almost Liliputian in its un-self-conscious penchant for happiness, but again, the noise. With each new spin it seems as though Some Loud Thunder will never escape the shadow of its more confident big brother. It’s hardly fair, and it speaks to a merciless public that is just as content to yank acclaim from a band as it is to dole it out. But, better that we choose our own winners and losers rather than money-wielding Sony executives choosing them for us, right? I vote with my feet, and this is me walking away from an album of potential criminally untapped.