Clap Your Hands Say What?

A situation that's happened many, many times: some new, up-and-coming band or artist is getting lots and lots of buzz, and lots of people seem to think they're great, so I check out a few songs to see what all the hype is about. Sometimes I like it and get into the artist myself (Broken Social Scene when You Forgot it in People came out, Sufjan Stevens when Seven Swans came out, Grandaddy when The Sophtware Slump came out), and sometimes I don't and send the tracks off to the recycle bin (The Arcade Fire, Interpol, The Rapture).*

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah fit in the latter category. A couple friends of mine liked it, they were getting good reviews, so I found their website and downloaded a few songs. Sounds decent enough, mildly appealing upbeat jangly guitars, then WHAM! The singer comes in, and everything takes a nosedive. Never have I meant it more when using the term "grating." So I tried to make it through the songs, and never really got past that voice, and trashed them.

But they keep rising and rising and rising. I can't remember the last time somebody got this much hype this close to the release of only their first album. In fact, Amazon.com and allmusic.com list the release date as September 13. Is it not even out yet?! I'm assuming they've jumped to a bigger label that can better handle the remarkable increase in demand for them, and that September 13 is the re-release, but if this is the first release date than this is truly unbelievable.

So I figured maybe I better give them a second chance, that I may have missed something by not listening as closely the first time. I downloaded their album, which naturally is widely available via any file-sharing network, and have been listening to it off and on recently. And in the end, I'm pretty much left with the same impression I first got: more or less likeable, except those vocals, moaned out onto tape by apparent Philly expat Alec Ounsworth.

I do like a lot of aspects of it: the tasteful synth use, the interweaving guitar parts that simultaneously sound completely impromptu and exhaustively rehearsed, and the fact that, aside from "In This Home on Ice," it sounds considerably less obnoxiously "new-wave" than a lot of this year's other big buzz bands, unless you consider upbeat, four-on-the-floor drums something found exclusively in new wave music. In fact, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have considerably more melodic talent than most of the groups to whom they keep getting compared. And is that a music box in "Sunshine and Clouds and Everything Proud"?

But then there's that voice. I keep hearing comparisons to David Byrne, but I just don't buy that. I've never listened to a Talking Heads record and wished that for the love of God, that singer had better shut up soon. Thom Yorke is probably a closer reference point, but a lot more nasal, and whiny. And kinda drunk. Ounsworth has a tendency of hitting the front ends of notes so hard that he breaks into a falsetto for just a split second, and it drives me insane. He slides lackadaisically from note to note, and it also drives me insane. I may sound too much like a "musician" to some people, so I should note that I don't always find a lack of "traditional" singing ability a bad thing. See Bob Dylan, Wayne Coyne, Neil Young, or even Fred Schneider. Hell, one of my favorite artists is Bjork, who would probably be considered an acquired taste by even her most die-hard fans (like me). But an acquired taste is what Alec Ounsworth is, and I guess I just haven't acquired it.

So yeah, here I am right where I was several months ago. It's not bad, and some of it is pretty good. If you pressed me for a rating, I'd say maybe a 6 out of 10. Does it warrant the hype? In my opinion, unless their live show is other wordly (which I doubt, considering that they still have to work mostly with the material on this album), not by a long shot. But I've never seen them live, so who knows?

I'll tell you one thing, though: I'm not getting past that voice any time soon.

*It should be noted here that just because I don't like something doesn't mean I think it's bad. Lots of people seem to interpret it that way. Sometimes albums are average but neither bad nor particularly engaging, or sometimes they just aren't my thing.