How cool are Clap Your Hands Say Yeah? Well, cool enough to shift forty thousand units from cardboard boxes before anyone had heard of them. Ice cold enough to make the universally knee-trembling reviews this album received stateside seem far too understated. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, Alec Ounsworth’s Brooklyn five piece has it all going on.
Even the handle rocks. There’s a fine art to naming a band (big shout out to the good people of The Connect For Orchestra and The Things) and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – taken from graffiti once spied in Philadelphia – is almost magical. Say it three times and the inherent musicality of the words will force you to click your heels and skip off down the street. On the album’s overture, it becomes a delirious polka-scored mantra; an irresistible invitation to come play in the scary circus tent with a killer choral refrain – “Clap your hands” demands Alec. “But I’m so lonely”, comes the response.
But play we shall. Emanating from some delightful place between David Byrne and Gordon Gano, Mr. Ounsworth’s human vibraphone vocal – combining the street-corner haranguing of Mark E. Smith – touches on such diverse subject matter as Iraq and child stars, frequently within the same damned song (‘Title Wave’). This charmingly, irresistibly demented ringleader is thunderously supported by a pounding bass and treble turned all the way up to (a nearly distorted) eleven.
Too cool for verse-chorus-verse, there are, few bridges to speak of, just lots of smaller insidiously hypnotic hooks – the dancing pink elephant keyboards on ‘Yellow Country Teeth’, the relentlessly pissed off rally of ‘Let The Cool Goddess Rust Away’. Yet, for all the wild doodling, every single track compels you to punch the air as if controlled by some freaky giant puppet-master.
Run away and join the carnival now before it becomes this year’s Hot Fuss.