Rush hour in Manhattan and Alec Ounsworth is trying not to collide with an oncoming bus or, worse still, get a parking ticket.
“Aw man!” he yelps. “I forgot you’d be phoning. The cops have a problem with people taking calls in traffic. Lemme pull in.”
Five minutes later, we find Ounsworth, songwriter and spiritual lodestone of the quirky – and superlatively buzzy – indie pop five-some Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, double-parked on the Lower East Side and conversing in a conspiratorial yammer.
“I might have to hang-up any second now, if the police turn up,” he mutters. That growling in the background is, you realise, his car engine, revving impatiently. You wonder whether you haven’t dialed the wrong number and – via some creepy cosmic feedback – plunged by accident into an NYPD Blue re-run.
Ounsworth comes across as sincere but a little wacky and maybe even slightly eccentric. Thus he is the perfect spokesperson for CYHSY, who have released one of the most exuberantly daft and fashion-decrying debuts in recent memory (it starts with the sound of a carnival whirligig and turns progressively weirder).
Like arriving pop brats Arctic Monkeys, the Brooklyn quintet owe their early success to internet-fueled word of mouth. Twelve months ago, the band began selling the self-titled album through their website. Business was initially slow – they shifted no more than five records a day, says Ounsworth.
So desperate were CYHSY to attract crowds to theirs shows, they even billed gigs as ‘parties’, neglecting to mention a rock group would be playing. On several occasions, this almost prompted a riot.
Things changed dramatically after the blogosphere took the band to its heart. The turning point was an ecstatic review in Pitchforkmedia, a somewhat longwinded Chicago webzine (whose maxim, evidently, is why use one word when 17 will do?)
Pitchfork raved about the record; suddenly CYHSY couldn’t keep up with demand. The day after the 'zine’s review ran, 600 orders arrived.
“It got to the point where it was really impossible for me to write and package them all individually,” says Ounsworth. “I think I missed a few.”
The Arctic Monkeys have famously played down the role of downloading culture in their rise; CYHSY are eager to do likewise.
“We were putting the record out ourselves, but bands have been at that for years. Twenty years ago we would have been advertising in the small pages of the music press and sending out singles from our kitchen. “
Half a year on , the music industry has dug its talons into Ounsworth’s project. Truth to tell, he’s not sure where it all might lead.
“This is happening without us planning it. Suddenly, we’re touring overseas, we’re doing a whole lot of press. There’s a real feeling that the machinery of the business is kicking in. I feel as though I’m being swept along."
For those who wish indie rock would quit sucking in its cheek bones and dating models, CYHSY’s loser aesthetic may sound like something from bed-sit heaven.
The first thing to strike newcomers will probably be Ounsworth’s voice. He sings in a Morrissey-meets-David Byrne inflected yammer which might, to certain ears, seem irritating. The off-kilter vocals are, the singer insists, entirely deliberate: “I used to sing maybe a little more cleanly, but now I have a better idea of how I can mess around.”
Glitchy and epically moochy, Ounsworth’s songs appear to tip hat to all number of forgotten obscurities (this writer was reminded of The Clean, you may be put in mind of Felt or Field Mice). Yet there are more obvious influences, also : Arcade Fire’s nervy, nagging ‘Laika’ single and – above all – Talking Heads, this year’s essential reference point for on-the-money young bands.
Listening to the record, one forms an impression of Ounsworth as a musical hoover, sucking up every influence he can lay claim to and spitting out a glorious hodgepodge. Naturally, he doesn’t quite see it that way.
“Indie rock? What,” he splutters, “is indie rock? We read about ourselves in the press and those words keep coming up. ‘Indie rock’ doesn’t mean a lot to me. All those bands we’re supposed to resemble ? I don’t know the first thing about any of them. I think we sound like Hall & Oates.”