Clap Your Hands, Say Ok
Maryanna Abdo
Issue date: 10/4/06 Section: Entertainment
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Perhaps my review of Tuesday's Clap Your Hands Say Yeah show at the Avalon will be colored by the fact that just after we'd arrived, one of my friends was discharged from the venue for "underage drinking." She'd forgotten her ID, and I bought her a beer. Things got a little ugly.
Bad luck aside, all the ingredients were there for the show to be great: a critically acclaimed indie-rock band in an intimate venue. Hipsters with catchy songs. What could be better? And yet my posse and I left less than satisfied.
To be sure, the show had its moments. The band took a few songs to work up a stride, and then hit a high note with the popular "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth." Band members boogied around stage, trading instruments, shaking their unwashed hair, jamming away despite the less-than-bumping crowd. And "In This Home On Ice" and "Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood" got some feet moving, including my own.
The band, which - as one reviewer puts it - teeters on the edge of obscurity and stardom, was made famous by internet bloggers and a placement on Rolling Stone's "Hot New Band" list in 2005. The album seems to fit well in my iTunes alongside the Arcade Fire and Interpol, but lacks the originality of either.
It's not that Clap Your Hands are derivative, even though their sound echoes tidbits of many different artists; they're a little bit grunge, a little bit Neil Young, a little bit 80's punk (welcome back David Byrne) and a little bit Dylan (lead singer Alex Ounsworth was - like Bob Dylan or a very worked-up Thom Yorke - almost incoherent).
The reason that Clap Your Hands doesn't seem very real is that they, themselves, don't seem to buy into their own music. There's nothing passionate or fervent about their recordings, and the live show had the same phoned-in quality. Perhaps most strangely, the band members seemed to have no chemistry with each other or the crowd. For all the emotional height their songs conjure up, with their screeching vocals and pregnant crescendos, the band seemed unable to muster any emotional depth. There was nothing risky or dangerous about the performance, which shortchanged the obvious potential of some songs.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah gave a performance that was the musical equivalent of Urban Outfitters: it had all the right ingredients, but in the end seemed just about average - a hodgepodge of trends lacking in depth or longevity.
They gave us a decent night out. Isn't that telling.
Bad luck aside, all the ingredients were there for the show to be great: a critically acclaimed indie-rock band in an intimate venue. Hipsters with catchy songs. What could be better? And yet my posse and I left less than satisfied.
To be sure, the show had its moments. The band took a few songs to work up a stride, and then hit a high note with the popular "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth." Band members boogied around stage, trading instruments, shaking their unwashed hair, jamming away despite the less-than-bumping crowd. And "In This Home On Ice" and "Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood" got some feet moving, including my own.
The band, which - as one reviewer puts it - teeters on the edge of obscurity and stardom, was made famous by internet bloggers and a placement on Rolling Stone's "Hot New Band" list in 2005. The album seems to fit well in my iTunes alongside the Arcade Fire and Interpol, but lacks the originality of either.
It's not that Clap Your Hands are derivative, even though their sound echoes tidbits of many different artists; they're a little bit grunge, a little bit Neil Young, a little bit 80's punk (welcome back David Byrne) and a little bit Dylan (lead singer Alex Ounsworth was - like Bob Dylan or a very worked-up Thom Yorke - almost incoherent).
The reason that Clap Your Hands doesn't seem very real is that they, themselves, don't seem to buy into their own music. There's nothing passionate or fervent about their recordings, and the live show had the same phoned-in quality. Perhaps most strangely, the band members seemed to have no chemistry with each other or the crowd. For all the emotional height their songs conjure up, with their screeching vocals and pregnant crescendos, the band seemed unable to muster any emotional depth. There was nothing risky or dangerous about the performance, which shortchanged the obvious potential of some songs.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah gave a performance that was the musical equivalent of Urban Outfitters: it had all the right ingredients, but in the end seemed just about average - a hodgepodge of trends lacking in depth or longevity.
They gave us a decent night out. Isn't that telling.
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