The Palm after the storm

Alec Ounswourth didn’t tumble off the face off creation when scornful reviewers and a fickle public inflicted a critical and commercial trouncing upon Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s second album in 2007. Instead he went one step further, holing up in post-Katrina New Orleans to record a jazz inflected old-timey record with a bunch of Crescent City veterans the very distant side of 65.

But now, with two oddball solo projects and a lot of hard-thinking, under his belt, this one time alt. pop buzz boy is preparing to revive the Clap Your Hands brand. With new LP Hysteria ready to drop and an Electric Picnic slot confirmed, the group are preparing to resume their awkward relationship with the mainstream. This time, says Ounswourth, things will be different.
“We needed to let it rest for a moment,” says the singer. “The scale of what we experienced took us by surprise somewhat in the beginning. It got to the point where we had to let the dust settle.”
How hurt was he by the trouncing inflicted on Some Loud Thunder, disparaged by one UK publication as the year’s worst release? After all the praise lavished on their 2005 self-titled debut – a close to perfect synthesis of toilet circuit grit and Talking Heads art-funk – the backlash must have come as a shock.
“It is confusing when you release a record that you think is good but the response isn’t there,” he proffers. “You start to wonder what they liked about you in the first place. At the same time, you don’t want to compromise with the critics of course. I don’t think that would be fair either to the band or the critic. People had a certain opinion of our record. Fair enough, you move forward. We had a different opinion.”

In his recent overview of the American music underground noted critic Greg Kot cited CYHSY as a rare example of a US band undone by media calumny (Stateside groups being far less at the mercy of the build-‘em-up-knock-’em-down syndrome than acts this side of the Atlantic). The problem, so far as Kot saw it, is that the Clap Your Hands, with unprecedented blogger hype at their back, graduated from tiny clubs to theatres and arenas before they’d had time to develop properly. Ounswourth understands where Kot is coming from. For all that, he doesn’t necessarily agree with the critique.
“I remember playing [100,000 capacity] Azteca Stadium in Mexico and thinking, ‘Why are we here?’ When we started I imagined us as a sort of Velvet Underground thing, performing for the sort of audiences where you can hear individual audience members clapping. We weren’t really shooting for the bigger venues that explicitly. With some bands, they actually seem to tailor their sound for large spaces. That said, when I look back, I think that the way we play, it’s a big sound. And when we’re all pushing in the same direction, that’s when what we do makes the most sense.”

Early on, a caricature solidified of Ounsworth as devoted misanthrope, a monosyllabic cross between the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt and a shy undergrad with communication issues. For sure, he’s never going to be first on the dancefloor or last off it. Nonetheless he doesn’t want the impression to go out that he’s utterly opposed to the idea of bringing his songs to the public.
“People have written about me being quote, unquote ‘reluctant’ in the spotlight. Sure, I’m probably on that side of the fence. Exposure doesn’t exactly suit me. Which isn’t to say I had huge difficulty with it. I do like playing live for people. Sometimes it’s only when I get out on stage and the music starts that I realise that.”
Though he doesn’t like to encourage the perception that Some Loud Thunder was the sound of a group trying to come to terms with months of hype, he will allow that the record was put together in a somewhat pressurised environment. With the taste-makers having moved on, no such problems attended the making of Hysteria.
“It was nice,” he notes. “It was little more of a relaxed atmosphere. One reason was that we did a lot of pre-production. I recorded a lot of it over the course of a week in Philadelphia and tinkered around with it between practice sessions. It was fantastic that we had a chance to take our time with it.”

Ounsworth is based in the comparative backwater of Pennyslvania’s largest city whilst the rest of the group are holed up in indie mother-lode Brooklyn. Did the singer ever feel the bright lights of New York calling?
“Well, Philadelphia feels like the centre of the universe to me,” he laughs. “New York is more populous. And how do I put this gently – it has worked hard to draw attention to itself. Philadelphia is my home. It’s a good city when you step back and look at it. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”