clap your hands and say yeah by abigail bruley

A Week With Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's "Some Loud Thunder": Day 1

29 January 2007
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Abigail Bruley

It’s okay to be piggish with your freedoms, to spoil your creativity, to let it do whatever it damn well pleases at all hours of the day. Should it want to jump off of a bridge, you ask which one and just double-check that it hadn’t eaten anything within the past hour to ward off the possibility that a cramp could seize it in the waters. Should that creativity want to thumb its nose at all convention, well, isn’t that what it’s there for, to decimate all static conventions. When the choices are to zig or zag, you encourage that rascally creativity of yours to zog — an as yet unheard of new way movement can bend in. You would want this because different is better. It always is. It always has been. Brooklyn’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, since it released its self-titled debut full-length two years ago, has made a very nice name for itself as the band that does everything its own way. The first record was self-released, packed into bubble envelopes by the band, carted down to the post office by the band and a major phenomenon that sold sick amounts of discs as the record industry essentially got a wake-up call that screamed this: Bands don’t need you! The band was thusly bombarded by every conceivable label hoping to snatch them up and win the coveted rights to release their music. The band wanted nothing of it. Sure, they listened, probably got a lot of free meals, but turned everyone down. It’s back with_Some Loud Thunder_ and without getting two songs into the album, it’s plainly heard that the band is truly making its own bed, drawing its own bath and cooking its own meals. It’s control over every aspect of its life and that must feel nice. But wouldn’t it have been better to make the title track to what will wind up being one of the most scrutinized and pored over albums of the year listenable? There’s the Gordon Gano-sounding Alec Ounsworth not just fuzzing out his voice with fashionable distortion, but applying the effect to the bass, the guitars and drums, making it sound as if the sound engineer was having microphone problems coming out his ass. It’s an amateur recording, or at the least an attempt to be difficult. The song pops and clips all over the place and you just wonder why this was thought to be a good idea. It does say a lot about a band that now doesn’t have to worry about much. And if they do, it’s obvious they don’t care what we think. Is this good or is this a problem?

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Official Site

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