So, this might take some getting used to. Like Marmite. Or sodomy. Alec Ounsworth’s voice doesn’t exactly say “kick off your shoes and get comfy, would you like a drink and perhaps a massage?”. He is not Will Young, granted. Actually, it’s a lot nearer to saying “Jesus! Take that tarantula away from my genitals and remove the damn electrode from my bleeding nipple! Quick!”. Take David Byrne of Talking Heads, deprive him of oxygen and shoot him up with barbiturates. In fact join him at the hip with David Brent if you must. You might be getting warm. But nothing’s ever really that disgusting, merely an acquired taste, a challenge to your bland palette. And that’s certainly the case here. What the other side of the rusty coin dragged across the blackboard says is that this is a naturally passionate voice untainted by the uniform expectations of rock ‘n’ roll’s conformity, one that’s comfortable and sincere and can stand upright adequately well until its blindsided and blown off-piste by a gust of sweet emotional fury. And it can be an enjoyably curious thing, but it will always be the first thing you talk about.
Philadelphia’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are the superfluously titled surprise alt-rock hit of last year in the States, to be filed alongside The Arcade Fire. They don’t sound exactly alike, but there is this common thread of exuberance, an ignorance of predetermined benchmarks, that runs through both bands’ output. Clap Your Hands are like the bitesize Arcade Fire in trendy indie clobber, if you like. But they take much more from The Strokes (sharpness), Talking Heads (wobbliness) and the Elephant 6 indie collective, particularly Neutral Milk Hotel (stretchiness and reach). And it’s not difficult to see how their always-verging-on-overflowing sense of melodic adventure, a boy’s own impulse to rough and tumble, won them a snowballing notoriety through word of mouth in electronic communities (word of mouse?) and took demand for this cheaply produced debut way beyond anything they could handle alone.
The key to success is often to be the same, but different, which CYHSY (hmm, not so catchy, maybe we’ll revert to the abbreviated Clap Your Hands) are. They’ve not made an album quite like the magic bullet that was ‘Is This Is?’, but there’s more exhilaration here than 3 whole Strokes records could assemble. And they bind that base with simmering electronic tensions that sound like the Postal Service album playing in the background, especially on ‘The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth’ and the dreamy ‘Over & Over Again’. Every song works itself into a glorious lather and tends to climax magnificently. ‘Gimme Some Salt’ stirs originally like it’s stretching and rolling in bed, rubbing sleep from its eyes, but by the end is doing push-ups and pumping melodic iron. ‘Heavy Metal’ is just an unstoppable runaway train but still sounds like it’s heading somewhere. ‘In This Home On Ice’ gains momentum subtly and is beautifully, lazily anthemic. Their sound gives the impression of influences absorbed, rather than tacked together. And this feels like a record that is just unique enough to never be copied.