Goff's Pick of the Week- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

My friend and FoaLiaB writer Eric once asked me what the absolute hipsteriest hipster band was. He had been using the band Parts and Labor previously to beguile fixed wheeled bicyclists and bearded urban farmers and was expressing interest in finding a new band for ammo. After hearing his inquiry and stroking my long beard for hours it finally hit me. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. This was the band that decided to take brakes and chains off of bicycles, the band that has grown every beard and moustache since ’05, the band that put the on into irony (it was just iry before that). And why did I come to this conclusion? Because as I said, one sentence ago, they really did put the on in irony.

 

My pick of the week this week is their self titled debut, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and boy is it a doozy. There are probably five or six songs on that album that could have been singles, the tracks Over and Over Again, The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth, Is This Love?, In This Home on Ice, and Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood all were worthy and three of them were singles. This means a lot too for an indie band that is singles focused as opposed to albums focused. And that the great thing about Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (the album), it isn’t singles based. Songs lead into each other, the music in one song naturally plays off of the sound of another song, tracks have cohesive themes. All in all the record is pretty smart in a genre that often offers very little in terms of intellectually stimulating content. It really keeps the listener engaged, and by the end you get the feeling that the forty five minutes you spent listening to it zoomed by. Its interesting how smooth the album zooms along when you consider how abrasive the singers voice is. Im not sure if he speaks like a regular person, but he certainly doesn’t sing like one, his sound is a bit like a combination of someone from the deep deep south and a Britain, and if you read that sentence and cringed than you have a pretty good idea of what I mean. Despite this though his voice works really well with the music which is buttery smooth, he is also quit skilled at creating melodic vocal lines, so even though his voice sounds shot he still sings very well.

 

And that voice is the first part of the irony that I described in the first paragraph. The band gets you to tap your toe to possibly the worst singing (or the best?) that you will ever hear on record (unless you’ve bootlegged a drunken karaoke session). The second part of the irony is perhaps even more ironic, as it turns out the band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah sucks. They are notorious for putting on awful live shows, and while I have never been to see them their reputation reaches pretty far and wide. Whats more is that they have released two more albums since Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and neither of them really lives up to what their debut did. Its almost as if Clap Your Hands Say Yeah went into the future, stole all of the singles off of albums they haven’t written yet, and brought them back for their debut, leaving nothing for future releases. More likely though the songs on their debut probably took years to write and be fine tuned and once thrown into the limelight with expectations of quick new releases the band never could keep up.

 

 

 

Regardless of their marred history, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah the album remains a classic, the sort of album you can sit down and listen to a hundred times and never be disappointed with. The lyrics are nice and engaging, the album is fun to listen too, and overall the band sounds great on this record.