MOG

CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH – SOME LOUD THUNDER (2007)

Alec Ounsworth’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were one of the stories of 2005. Buoyed by the bloggers, some positive reviews from the Indie websites, the jerky post punks’ debut effort was a surprising success, and another example of the power of creating the groundswell of interest via the internet. Their sophomore release carries a degree of expectation that travels much further and deeper than your average IP address. For “Some Loud Thunder” awaits spaces on record shop shelves and Radio DJ comment, and for that reason there may be a temptation for the band to compromise the sound to suit, or to be stuck somewhere between. No such possibility in Ounsworth’s eyes, and indeed the band have veered a path even more acutely left field, and so the resultant release is an adamant statement of extreme lo-fi convolution to the point where if the band don’t produce distortion organically, then producer Dave Friedman has added a synthetic studio fuzz to further the album from the mainstream. It’s been confirmed by the band that the opener “Some Loud Thunder” and “Arm And Hammer” have received deliberate splashes of weird noise, that in the case of the latter make the song virtually unlistenable.

One’s judgement of “Some Loud Thunder” depends very much on the level of patience one has with both Ounsworth’s voice and lyrics. Most listeners will be aware that his David Byrne on helium warbling is an acquired taste and can be positively swallowed up by a good song, but there just isn’t enough quality or melody in the tunes to escape his vocal shortcomings. In addition, much of the lyrical content takes on lazy word assimilations, as on the marching “Goodbye To The Mother And The Cover” with lines like “The nose, the feet, the ear, to see, to fool, to stop, too late, blue cop, and you, are me, to wear, no clothes, to strike, no pose”. The title track, with its criminally rough distortion sets the album off badly, and there’s rarely a smattering of interest from the rest, with only the instrumentally intriguing “Underwater (You And Me), and the single, “Satan Said Dance”, which will fit on your Indie Dance mix tape, without ever being truly insistent. The rest lurches from the unintelligible (“Arm And Hammer”, “Five Easy Pieces”), to dour banal (“Mama Won’t You Keep Those Castles…”). If somebody from the record company told you that the band were deliberately making an attempt to disappear into the ether, then “Some Loud Thunder” is as apt a mission statement one could possibly find.

To sum up, it’s a snapshot of the law of diminishing returns, amateur hour for the college common room kid, and an accurate effort in flushing all the initial intrigue created by the debut, right down the toilet.

5/10