Clap Your Hands Say Yeah @ Mandela Hall, Belfast

Primed to attract and repel in equal measure, Alec Ounsworth’s disaffected drawl is pure vocal Bovril and, for many, the CYHSY maker/breaker. An acquired taste, it will either have you clutching that CYHSY record to your chest in fevered, heart palpitating devotion or reaching for the nearest scalpel to perform a Van Gogh ear double.
Tonight, Ounsworth is at his phlegmatic best, hacking up his idiot-savant poetics like he’s trying to channel David Byrne through his nasal passages.
If only the other members of this Brooklyn-based collective were as animated. Audience interaction patently not their forte, it's only after the first five songs, and with a curt “thank you”, that CYHSY acknowledge our presence.
The opening ‘Let The Cool Goddess Rust Away’ teeters on the brink of disintegration. It’s a precise, unnerving balancing act. ‘The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth’ combines intemperate guitar and keyboard swoon to fashion insidious tendrils of sound.
Throughout, Ounsworth is the fulcrum. His disjointed shimmy and paranoiac preppiness during a pensive ‘Is This Love?’ is disconcerting to behold.
‘Upon This Tidal Wave Of Young Blood’ sends a wrecking ball through the wall of sound, its coruscating guitar cutting through the keyboard scree to collide with the vocal. It is the sound of love and hate, a pained exorcism, a magisterial parting shot.