20 Years Of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Photo: Pieter M. Van Hattem
So many albums immediately come to mind if you were a teenager/young adult twenty years ago while yearning for memories that could transcend space and time. Perhaps Arcade Fire’s “Funeral” or Wolf Parade’s “Apologies To The Queen Mary” made your legendary after-school playlist before you and your friends met up to skate at the local community center parking lot. Could it have been Modest Mouse’s “Good News For People Who Love Bad News” or TV On The Radio’s “Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes”? Whatever it may be, it is no surprise that there is a universal connection between community, county, and country when it comes to this era of music. Now, if only you could remember if you paid the babysitter before you and your spouse went out on the town. Having established the Philly/Brooklyn-based hyper-pop group Clap Your Hands Say Yeah during a time and place in music culture that was eagerly excited and fully capable of supporting itself, Alec Ounsworth exercised the unlimited possibilities of the iconic indie music scene by intimately introducing a brilliant blend of rhythm, and telling texture to an audience that couldn’t have inhaled it any faster. The early to mid-2000s were fundamentally fresh, unpolluted, and safe from social media chaos in its early wake, and what CYHSY captured just a year into being a group is undeniably what makes them one of the great indie outfits of their generation. An idea that was supposed to act as a placeholder for a one-off show, Ounsworth spotted graffiti in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn while going back and forth from rehearsal, deciding this was the name, you can’t imagine it being anything else.
“As I remember it, those early sessions were very much a special moment in time – piling into one hotel room to wake up and go to a real studio (!) to try to come up with something special just for the fun of it.”
Self-releasing their self-titled album back in 2005, the group unleashed perhaps one of the most influential and highly held albums in its respective genre. An intelligent interior that is well-lit in a marvelous hallway someplace sacred and obsessively missed, what CYHSY accomplished in the early days is similar to the ethos of Talking Heads’ “77” and New Order’s sophomore album “Power, Corruption & Lies” and its radical influence on society, culture, and music as a whole. Quickly gaining tonal traction with a fanbase that consisted of the likes of David Byrne and the late David Bowie, CYHSY was off to the races as a free-flowing process developed organically for the band and its members Sean Greenhalgh, Robbie Guertin, and brothers Lee and Tyler Sargent in a way that was both promising and logistically legit. Recorded on a budget that consists of most bands’ lunch budget these days, the group spread out the material that initially began as an EP from Providence to Red Hook in Brooklyn and quickly began to develop a full album of masterful melodies that reflected the timid times, and electrifying essence we know today. Mining the early days of Myspace and the Renaissance of music websites such as Pitchfork and Aquarium Drunkard, a new dawn in an industry virtually unknown and untapped was beginning to take shape as this breathing movement of fundamental fun and cultural consciousness would soon take over the world. After two decades, the band’s subliminal debut still reaches and cosmically connects audiences worldwide, and with a North American Tour kicking off this week, the band will perform their iconic debut in its entirety. Don’t forget to leave pizza money for the babysitter and be back by eleven.
