2005: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
By Max Ufberg
The first time I met Alec Ounsworth was in the fall of 2013. He and his band, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, were about to headline a festival in Philadelphia called Bloktoberfest, where they would perform in the parking lot of a Caribbean restaurant called Jamaican Jerk Hut. Alec was doing some local press to spread the word about the show; I was writing a semi-regular music column for Philadelphia Weekly. We were a match made in heaven.
The Alec who greeted me at a pleasant neighborhood cafe that day was much more inconspicuous than I had expected. Because I was only 23 and adored Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (this latter fact unknown to Alec, or to my editor at Philadelphia Weekly), I was expecting someone a little more bombastic and imposing, someone whose arrogance and brilliance seeped out of them like sweat or blood. But what I saw was a wiry guy in his mid-30s sporting a hoodie and red baseball cap, whose reedy voice, when not scored by guitars and drums, actually sounded pretty unremarkable. He looked like your typical mid-aughts indie rock aficionado, which is to say, he looked like he would have listened to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (let’s make this easier and refer to them as CYHSY).
The band first caught my attention, like it did so many others’, in 2005, when they released their self-titled debut. Full of jangly post-punk guitar, whirring synth, and Alec’s nasally voice, the album was everything critics in the early 2000s wanted in an indie rock record: danceable and goofy, yet not without its virtuosic qualities. By the time I met Alec in 2013, that sound has been copied and codified enough to have earned its own designation: blog rock, a nod to the frenetic—read: Millennial—musicality and, more practically, to the distribution model (CYHSY were early pioneers of the DIY self-release approach). But in 2005, when Alec and co. dropped Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, that pejorative didn’t exist. Instead, what everyone heard was a collection of songs that sounded, according to Pitchfork, like “Arcade Fire if their music were more fun-loving and less grave.” Billboard declared it a “nearly perfect album,” and NPR named it one of the 50 important albums of the early-aughts.
Even today, when the band’s formula has been copied by enough musical acts to constitute a 24/7 playlist for succulent-adorned cafes across the country, that debut record holds up. Go ahead, listen to “The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth,” the closest thing CYHSY had to a mainstream single on the album. Listen to the synth and drums work in tandem to thrust the song forward with a hallucinogenic sense of urgency. Hear the guitar shimmer and noodle alongside the rhythm like some kind of cosmically urgent ambulance siren. Try to make sense of what Alec means when he careens through lines like “But let me tell you/I have never planned/To let go of the hand that has been/Clinging by its thick country skin/To my yellow country teeth.” (In its glowing review, Pitchfork said his voice sounded like “Paul Banks attempting to yodel through Jeff Mangum's throat.” I have no idea what that means, nor, I suspect, did the writer.) It’s a capital-g Great record, and its greatness all but guaranteed an onrush of good-but-not-great imposters—those well-intended hucksters who would prompt the blog rock label—and a public that would, in turn, tire of not just the copy but also the source material.
CYHSY never did manage to recapture the magic of that first album. Their second release, 2007’s Some Loud Thunder, was actually pretty good—a little too self-conscious and, related to that, a little unnecessarily rough around the edges, but good nonetheless. The next three releases ranged from uninspired to reductive, as if the band was imitating the very people who’d imitated them in the first place. I wanted to touch on all of this—the rapid ascent, the slow and circuitous fall—when I met Alec in 2013, but he didn’t seem much interested in reflecting on all that. The most I could get him to say was that he never thought much about acclaim in the first place. “I don’t read reviews,” he told me. “If people show up to shows, then I gather that it’s working for some people. If they don’t, it’s not.” (My profile of Alec, which now that I’ve re-read it seems obsequious to the point of stupidity has thankfully been lost to the SEO swamps of the internet. I’ve still got my old print copy, but you’d have to pry it from my lifeless hands in order to read that rubbish.)
A few days after our interview I went to see the band play their gig at the Jamaican Jerk Hut. They were pretty good, loose and comfortable with the arrangements. And, from what I can remember, people did show up to see them play. A lot of people. So, by Alec’s estimation, I guess the band was chugging along just fine, even if the polish had worn off a bit.
I saw them again a few years later. I was by then living in San Francisco, and CYHSY were out performing their debut in its entirety. I’m not sure why Alec had agreed to play the album front to back. It seemed like such a gimmick, like such an un-CYHSY career move. But what do I know? Maybe they weren’t selling enough tickets. Maybe they just like playing those songs. The band was phenomenal that night. They pummeled tightly through the setlist, stopping only to hydrate or for Alec to mumble a half-hearted attempt at another joke. I wanted to say hello after the show, to see how the last couple years had been treating him. But I decided not to. It felt slightly awkward, even a tad embarrassing. Here we were, I thought, musician and fan stuck in the past.
But I was wrong. I should have said hello, and congratulated him on the tour. What an extraordinary thing to create a song that people care about. And what cynicism—what insecurity—it would take to turn your back on that beatitude. Thankfully Alec’s a wiser man than me.
Max Ufberg is a senior editor at Medium. He has also written for such outlets as The New Yorker, Wired, Outside, and the Washington Post.