Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Sorry I haven't been posting all that much, I've been somewhat preoccupied with the actions of a megalomaniacal Saffy and his daffy Nazi flunkies.

I bought this off some guy on Discogs earlier this year. I want to hate it. I wish I could just post "more like, crap your pants say yeah" and a .gif of Matt Hardy walking down the entrance ramp and move on with my life. But I just can't manage to genuinely dislike it. Is it overhyped? Absolutely. Is it transparent about its influences? To my ears, it's clearly half Velvet Underground, half Talking Heads, and a little dash of Elephant 6 – that is to say, it’s music blogger catnip.

The intro is corny and the only genuine skip on the record, so I’m primed to dislike it from the drop. The first few songs are pretty naked Velvet Underground bites, but they’re competent bites. Once we hit “My Yellow Country Teeth” and the drummer drops his Moe Tucker cosplay, things start really roaring. I love it when punk bands get a little disco with it. It’s also the song that helped me unlock the theme of the album. This record’s all about deconstructing the New York scenes that created the Velvet Underground, the Talking Heads, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah themselves.

The same impulses that caused hicks from West Virginia to move to New York still applied in the early 00s – cheap rent, romance, likeminded people. However, the spirit of possibility has left the city (“I heard it from a friend/The revolution’s dead”) and there’s a subsequent void in the soul of New York art-punk that the Strokes’ money can’t fill (“What happened to our heavy metal? What happened to our coat of arms?”). It’s not just looking at the past in comparison to the present, but also engaging actively with the New York wasteland. There’s some nods to Afghanistan on “In This Home On Ice”, to Iraq on “Tidal Wave of Blood”, and to Trick Daddy and Ludacris on “Gimme Some Salt”. There’s so much tangled in Alec Ounswourth’s yelping that twenty years on I can’t possibly catch every allusion and reference. I haven’t mentioned the yelping yet, have I – Ounswourth has one of those beautifully awful yelps. It takes the record from banal cleverness to something more primal. More real.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is a good album, and I like it.