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X-POSURE LISTENER BLOG 8 - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!

added 15 September 2011 at 10.16

This week's listener blog comes from Christina Dodkin - check out her review of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! at Scala.

"It’s safe to say ‘Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’ – and particularly lead singer Alec Ounsworth’s dissonant, David Byrne-esque vocals - are not to everyone’s taste.  It’s a surer bet, though, that for Wednesday’s crowd at the Scala this was a taste they had long since acquired. 

CYHSY whipped through a fan-pleasing set, combining surefire first album classics with impressive new material from their third and latest, ‘Hysterical’, to create a wall of sound that reached the farthest corners of the labyrinthine venue.  And by the time the band attacked hooky singalong ‘Satan Said Dance’ even the usually taciturn Ounsworth couldn’t help but crack a smile at the crowd’s response and proclaim to his audience, ‘You guys are great’.

My friend’s first response to the rapidly filling main auditorium was that it reminded him of ‘Flight of the Conchords’’ ode to gender imbalance at the club, ‘Too Many Dicks on the Dancefloor’.  And it’s true the Brooklyn/Philadelphia-based quintet’s unique and at times uncompromising approach to music and meticulous attention to detail has perhaps naturally found its niche audience in the fanboy.  Indeed the band’s sound, Ounsworth’s often oblique lyrics, and even their album artwork all seem to suggest a fully formed world into which only the initiated can travel.

Surprising then, that the new material on display tonight seems primed to introduce the band to a more mainstream audience.  A million miles away from ‘Some Loud Thunder’s’ deliberately confrontational speaker-overload production, new tracks combined CYHSY’s always toe-tapping percussion with meatier rhythms, and added to thick, bouncing baselines and soaring choruses saw the band reaching for new heights. 

It should be added though that this aspiration never came at the expense of credibility, never came close to the cynical attempts to curry favour with the V Festival crowd of which other bands that shall remained nameless (let’s call them Lings of Keon), are guilty.  This was still pop music with darkness beneath the surface, mournful and yearning as well as uplifting.

And a previous gig I saw promoting the second album felt slightly subdued, pitched more at chin-stroking  fans as a result of more gentle, less immediate material, ‘Hysterical’s tunes seem designed to get a crowd jumping and singing.  And sing they did.  The louder chants threatened to drown out the PA and even the catchier of the band’s guitar riffs were not immune from being transmitted back at the stage in a cacophony of voices, almost football crowd-like.

CYHSY are not a band of many words, it must be said, and don’t provide much of the interaction at their gigs that some look for, but, to use the cliché, they let their music do the talking.  And where previously they might have been preaching to the converted, and only to the converted, Wednesday’s gig suggested a band searching, for the right reasons, for a new congregation."

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