Welcome then, to this year’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Although we realise that strictly speaking this year’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, having snuck through on a UK release date technicality. This season’s CYHSY anyway, more dusty summer than spring, we’re certain of that. It’s a convenient comparison, granted, but it is relevant one beyond just being 2006’s approved US indie hyperbole magnet. From their self-sourced DIY beginnings, through to shipping countless records from their respective bedrooms (or equally low-key lodging space) off the back of relentless touring and online networking, through shared fringe influences, similarly strained acquired-taste vocals and a high quality threshold, never knowingly undersold. But this is very much its own album, standalone in its brilliant, spring-loaded, lo-fi definition.
And it is a very indie album indeed, dense in its honed influences, but to the point where you feel you’re in reassuringly safe hands, rather than being patronised or short-changed. Music made by music fans for music fans – to coin a rather cheesy but fitting fanzine phrase – drawing on the timeless lifeblood of engrained legends like The Pixies, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Talking Heads and Modest Mouse and then spitting it out like some maverick boho artist and finding the outline figure of Tom Waits in the splattered jetsam drying in the afternoon sun. And it’s an album driven damn hard; the drums really are the don throughout, jutting prominently into the frame keeping all else flowing naturally with its chin up, executing jazz, evil treadmill country, sharp new-wave and slacker indie rhythms with an effortless cuts-through-wire finesse.
Pretty much every song is lightly drizzled with rough acidic Black Francis-esque sectioned rantings, often nonsensical but delivered like an impassioned argument, none more so than on the viral crackling hillbilly single ‘Insistor’, beginning helium soft, blown this way and that by the breeze, but ending like the big man thrown through the desert at the will of a cyclone. But neither this aspect, nor others, ever become too overbearing and the album benefits from a balanced, inclusive overall sound.
It’s not exactly an album of songs, it’s more stacks of ideas thrust together – a sun-dried riff here, a binding rhythm there, some satisfyingly aimless tinkering, a heavy handed climax, hung off an unfaltering core beat – but out of all that rise a number of wholesomely tuneful creatures with real backbone. The brilliant ‘Jackov’s Suite’ is like an epic freewheeling 70s rock go-cart race with a comedown party round Stephen Malkmus’ place with Thurston Moore playing the tunes and leading the group sing-song. ‘Just Drums’ is all about the momentum, like Clinic meets Archie Bronson Outfit and the drunk dreamlike ‘Omaha’ is Low on fast forward and is the best song that Bright Eyes will probably never record. It’s not immediately obvious as a clear album of the year, but its nagging subtleties leave you asking why on earth it can’t be. Either way, it’s good enough for us to keep our eyes peeled for 2007’s Tapes ‘N Tapes.