Clap Your Hands Say Hmm…

originally published April 11, 2007

Steve Double

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is playing at the 40 Watt Club on Thursday, Apr. 19. Elvis Perkins opens, and advance tickets cost $19.

By 2020, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (hereinafter only to be referred to by the band's acronym, CYHSY) will be considered essentially the Ned's Atomic Dustbin of the '00s. That may seem unlikely in the current media moment, but lest we forget, indie has been through at least three great cycles already, and each of these produced countless "important" bands now indistinguishable from their peers. This isn't necessarily a criticism, since good art sometimes burns hot but short, and many lost indie bands are well deserving of their inevitable resurrection. (Everyone who lived through the '90s has a pet band from that period they consider unjustly forgotten. Mine's the Geraldine Fibbers.) It just means that those bands' legacies are contextual rather than musical: what does the fact that they were considered important at one time say about that particular moment? It's always hard to predict hindsight, but let's try and get a little perspective on CYHSY.

Tellingly, the one unambiguously great thing about CYHSY is the members' business plan. They sold tens of thousands of copies of their first release without any label involvement, paying for the pressing and shipping themselves, and presumably reaping most of the profits. Practically, this is unusual. While thousands of Internet jabberers see a brave new world of labels dying out, most bands with a whiff of success still sign standard record deals. These guys stuck to their guns and showed it could not only be done, but be done with a much greater return than you'd get with a record contract.

This, however, is the only way in which they're not an amalgam of every contemporaneous indie trope. They're mainly based in Brooklyn; they have keyboards and a yelpy lead singer; they sometimes use danceable beats; and they were boosted to prominence by a glowing Pitchfork review. They have a knack for genuinely catchy songs ("By The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth" and "On a Tidal Wave of Young Blood" off the first, self-titled album; "Satan Said Dance" and "Yankee Go Home" off Some Loud Thunder, the new one), which is why it's so baffling that they revert to default indie the rest of the time. They throw in a lot of noises, certainly, but compare them to Meow Meow, a Pitchfork-approved band that didn't take off. The members of that band used their noise inventively, sculpturally and deliberately, whereas CYHSY seems to scatter uninteresting bursts of formless static disconnectedly over meandering songs. The self-produced first album has an easy-going sound, but although Dave Fridmann is at the helm of the new one, it's aggressively under-produced, sounding, aside from three or four songs, in every way like a recording from a practice session. "Arm and Hammer" even seems to have been taken off a cassette four-track, and making something lo-fi in 2007 is a deliberate aesthetic choice that is, unless carefully justified, embarrassing. CYHSY is not careful.

No one uses the term "easy listening" anymore, and maybe that's because so much of what we consume is. Like their NYC contemporaries in Grizzly Bear, the CYHSY guys sound like background music, which there's nothing wrong with, except that the noises and the backstories and the business plans then seem like justifications, artistic signifiers overlaid on simply pretty music so the kids won't feel put off by the fact that their parents like it, too. The fact that CYHSY is considered important in 2007 means that the wrong people won. Brooklyn indie is a useful microcosm, and follow the arc - from electroclash to dance-punk to CYHSY et al. - it's a shocking diminution of ambition, energy and quality. Instead of going with the people who reach beyond what they're comfortable with to try new things, we're going with the people that sound like the bands we listened to in college. The former folks - acts like the Fiery Furnaces and Scissor Sisters and Adult. and Moldy Peaches - got called all sorts of horrible names by some of the cool kids, because they were sticking their necks out and trying to broaden the scope of indie's world, but no one ever calls CYHSY horrible names. After all, there's nothing really specifically hatable about the group, and that's both telling and sad.

For all the talk of Brooklyn's early '00s indie movements being scenestery and bandwagonesque, this new crop is, if anything, even more so. The race now is not to be best, but to go to the most shows of bands you know, to get the most disinterestedly recorded singles out, to befriend the right promoters, and all the bands are content to sound like "indie rock" rather than like something new, or even something old. Consequently, they all sound like each other, because they've all learned the wrong lesson from the crash of indie's brief dance incursion: that if you stick out, you get beat down. But if people are taking shots at you, that probably means you're doing something right.

So don't consider this a shot at Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. It's nothing so dramatic. This is just a resigned sigh: no cause for alarm, just another band.

Michael Barthel

Liner Notes is Flagpole's music opinion column. To contribute, contact music editor Chris Hassiotis with ideas and pitches at music@flagpole.com