clap your hands and say yeah by abigail bruley

A Week With Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's "Some Loud Thunder": Day 3

2 February 2007
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Abigail Bruley

There’s a great Beach Boys album — Beach Boys’ Party!, that was glued together with Stack-O-Tracks in 2001 to become a double-album when a run of re-issues became available — where the boys from Hawthorne, Calif., basically sat around their recording studio and played acoustic guitars in a circle for their friends and girlfriends. You can see some of those girlfriends pictured on the cover of the album. Someone probably brought some homemade nacho dip, there were probably some beach blankets and plenty of alcohol. They played numerous Beatles covers in a set that often didn’t even contain full versions of the cover songs that they performed. It sounded like a great time and nothing that really belonged on a record. It’s one of my favorite records for that same reason. I’ve grown fond of Innocence & Despair by The Langley Schools Music Project, which features twistedly talented elementary school-aged children singing and playing Beach Boys, Bay City Rollers and David Bowie songs in a gymnasium. It probably is unlikely material for an album. What we have in Some Loud Thunder — so it seems — is a combination of Party!, The Langley Schools and a deadly serious piece of art that would be pained to to be taken or accepted lightly. Whereas Clap Your Hands’ debut was relatively full and rich and flushed out, this album is more of an indulgence. It’s also more of an exploration back into both of those things that take up the title of the performance done by those Canadian school children, talked into working on and recording popular radio songs by a hippie educator. It’s Ounnsworth getting into despair as if it were a package of cookies and astutely navigating the channels through which we all likely used to do things — innocently and through pure impulse and instinct. The songs are surprisingly bare-chested and shivery in the wind. I can hear them all being played around a campfire. Intertwining them with the dark and foreboding, far-off trees, there’s the spookiness of a ghost story in them, only the songs aren’t for horror purposes, unless the daily grind, a grind that is markedly different from the one that Clap Your Hands is currently living in, is horrific. What’s found is a quietude and comfortability in these songs that could have been missing in a sophomroe record as anticipated as this one. .

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