There’s a surprisingly solid turn out for the first night of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s European tour .The five years that have elapsed since their unlikely, compelling mash-up of Talking Heads and ‘90s lo-fi commandeered the zeitgeist have evidently not diminished their popularity. If anything, early onset nostalgia may have enhanced the appeal of Alec Ounsworth’s scrappy Philly crew.
Memory isn’t playing tricks – those early quasi hits really are special. The caffeinated white funk of ‘Skinny White Yellow Teeth’ is as entrancing as you remember, Ounsworth’s underdog yelp straining for coherence against a backdrop of student disco janglings; with its epic riffing ‘Let The Cool Goddess Rust Away’ prefigures Arcade Fire without losing its way in empty bombast; ‘Heavy Metal’ (saved for the encore) is rollicking and deft in the same heartbeat. A bigger shock, perhaps, is how well 2007’s critically eviscerated Some Loud Thunder has held up – lead single ‘Satan Said Dance’ feels less like a novelty tune nowadays than an angry indie pop mantra.
Still it won’t have escaped the frontman’s notice that the room’s enthusiasm flags whenever a new song is hauled out. While the group’s recent third album Hysterical is a solid affair, cuts like ‘Ketamine And Ecstasy’ and ‘The Witness’ Dull Surprise’ come off as pulse-coolingly generic. An insistence on layering everything in meat’n’spuds indie guitars doesn’t help – as an umpteenth rocking outro rumbles past you begin to wish someone would hide Ounsworth’s FX pedals. What you take away from the evening is that Clap Your Hands were a fantastic band whose potential greatness has not completely withered away. For now, however, they seem stuck in a holding pattern, and its easy to image them on a low, steady slouch towards irrelevance. In the meantime, we’re still clapping...