Clap Your Hands For The Bleeding Edge.
Geeky .MP3 Reviews: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Besides Frodo and I making an appearance at a few local shows, my tenure as Music Editor here at the Weekly Geek can hardly be described as "cutting edge" (With the 80's flashbacks and day-old album reviews and all). But here in 2007 some things should change damnit! So I’m making a more concerted effort to bring you the latest and greatest in the world of music. So now, just in from the news wire of the pop scene, I bring you some... (get ready for this...) PRE-release track reviews!!! (Holy crap. I'm so excited!)
Portland has quietly been spitting out some of the best rock talent in the last decade- everyone from the late, great Elliott Smith to the defunct Sleater-Kinney owing Oregon's Metropolis their lineage. The Seattle bands have gotten most of the attention in ages past, but it's high time our southerly neighbors got their due.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah debuted with a new-wavish, punchy self-titled group of tracks in 2005. Since then, they've started an odd, fashionable style of having bouncy melodies, yet delivering the lyrics in the most utterly aloof way imaginable. Nevertheless, the college radio circuit backed the record with heavy rotation and it made almost every music magazine's "next big thing" list, and for good reason. Alec Ounsworth, Clap Your Hands' lead singer, being the focus of most of the praise, despite the strange voicing.
So the band, gearing up for their 2007 set, made two downloads available from the new Some Loud Thunder (which arrives in stores and on iTunes January 30th).
All Songs Considered's Bob Boilen made a statement last week about the band's new veneer on the last NPR Podcast. He said he would've rather heard Some Loud Thunder's songs "the way they were played, instead of the way they were produced." I couldn't disagree more. The more upbeat of the new cuts "Underwater (You and Me)" illustrates why less production isn't more as far as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is concerned. The layers and new gloss on Alec's voice and the rest of the band's instruments create a magnetic, glowing aura, not present in their first CD. Instead of sounding disaffected, they sound fanciful. Instead of blasé, they sound inspiring. With flighty, pinging guitars you follow the poetic line "someday your secret will be revealed" with great intent and longing much like in more recent Built To Spill songs.
The piano work and spacey guitars of the slower "Love Song No. 7", floating vocals and well organized harmony structures, coupled with the loose drums and an accordion passage helps today's audiences revisit some of the ideas in the eeriest moments of 60's physchadelia. When Alec sings "safe and sound" you can sense the sarcasm and you feel the ground Clap Your Hands are treading is anything but safe.
With the help of long time Flaming Lips engineer Dave Fridmann, this is an incredible step forward for a band that could've limited itself to the current "cool sound" and still been successful. I think it's a risk that will pay off for them in the long run if these two songs are any indication of the greatness achieved on Some Great Thunder.
You can download the .mp3's of the two songs for free at Clap Your Hands' Official Website.
Also highly recommended: download the band's first album Clap Your Hands Say Yeah on iTunes: 
What say you?!