Few moments in 2000s indie were more explicitly “You had to be there” than Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s debut album. I mean this in a very literal sense: While prepping for this essay, I asked my wife — a fellow ex-Pitchfork contributor who started meaningfully paying attention to indie’s myriad trends and shifts just two years after the Philadelphia band’s self-titled 2005 bow — if they ever meant anything significant to her as a college-aged listener at the time. “Not really,” she shrugged with casual indifference.
Indeed, even if the groundswell of buzz and chatter didn’t feel this way at the time, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah was a meteoric but highly specific blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the grand scheme of blog-era indie rock, as well as an inarguable inflection point when it came to the blogosphere’s overall tastemaking abilities. Released 20 years ago this Saturday, it’s a record that’s truly indicative of the times in which it emerged from; it carries no real legacy when it comes to sonic impact, instead functioning as a milemarker for indie’s cultural trajectory across the decade at large.
If you were the type of internet-native millennial indie rock listener in the mid-2000s prone to downloading an MP3 from a band you’ve never heard of and thinking, “What else are they capable of?,” Clap Your Hands Say Yeah may have just been the ne plus ultra of that particular sensation. Others’ point of entry before hearing the album in full may have varied, but for my 17-year-old self at the time, my first taste was in the form of what I still believe is the album’s strongest and most interesting song, “In This Home On Ice” — a swirling, pungent concoction of shoegaze-y guitar noise that was almost disarmingly straightforward in its confused prettiness. If it was possible to wear out a digital file at the time, I did so.
When I went to see the band perform a well-attended free show at NYC’s South Street Seaport just a few months later, I found myself slightly disappointed that they weren’t able to replicate the song’s textures live. I felt a similar sense of letdown after hearing the entirety of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah for the first time, as little else on the record possesses the glowing strangeness of “In This Home On Ice.” (An obvious exception, of course, is the album’s grating opener “Clap Your Hands!,” which is much less a song than it is the type of carnival-barker scene-setting that made indie contemporaries the Decemberists sound spartan and disaffected by comparison.)
The bulk of the record is — and this is just me being honest here, so apologies for any nostalgic pearl-clutching that this might trigger — bog-standard indie rock that’s highly indicative of its time and place, its most distinctive feature being bandleader Alec Ounsworth’s high-pitched, lyric-obscuring whine of a voice. It did (and still does) suffer from pacing issues brought on by a sonic uniformity that causes every song’s spiky, strummy jangle to bleed together, rendering the record’s relatively unremarkable interludes as a functional necessity.
Perhaps better sequencing would’ve helped, and I’m not just saying that because of my belief that listeners really shouldn’t have to be subjected to “Clap Your Hands!” If you took the record’s strongest section — the elegant “Details Of The War,” the sync-friendly oddness of “The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth,” and “Is This Love?,” which now scans as pure catnip for Talking Heads’ newly earned Gen-Z fanbase — and placed those tracks at the front of the record (an act of tracklist-shuffling as easily said as done in the iPod era), it’s possible you’d end up with a record that feels more intentional, and quite possibly more enduring, by design.
Let’s zero in on matters of intent for a second, because the act of being caught off-guard is central to the mythology that made Clap Your Hands Say Yeah the blog-centric hit that it was. The record itself was perhaps the last truly out-of-nowhere sensation to hit indie rock in the 2000s and quite possibly the 21st century in general; even the actual best debut album within the genre from 2005, Wolf Parade’s roaring and raucous Apologies To The Queen Mary, was preceded by several buzzy EPs and a sense of anticipation that regular gigging provided.
Fittingly, Wolf Parade and CYHSY would mirror each other once more later in the decade by releasing expectation-subverting follow-ups — respectively, the prog-tastic At Mount Zoomer and the Dave Fridmann-manned Some Loud Thunder — that are better and more interesting than their reputations have suggested. Released in 2007, Some Loud Thunder also arrived in the thick of a drastically changed indie landscape that, thanks to landmark and decade-defining records from artists like LCD Soundsystem, M.I.A., Panda Bear and Animal Collective, Feist, Justice, and Bon Iver, largely reflected the genre dropping the “rock” suffix from its nomenclature while entering a true imperial era.
We talk a lot these days about how fast everything moves, but the speed of escalation in indie’s cultural trajectory in the back half of the 2000s was truly whiplash-inducing — and the rising tide of blog buzz that lifted CYHSY’s boat certainly was swift even by those standards. We’re talking about a band with a name borrowed from Brooklyn graffiti that was supposed to be temporary, whose album was recorded on the cheap and hand-delivered to tri-state area record stores in a manner that truly underlined the “indie” in indie rock — all of which is to suggest a band that was the polar opposite of being ready for prime time.
And yet: The highly adulatory Pitchfork review of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (branded with a 9.0 during a period of time in which higher scores were much easier to come by), in a very “mid-2000s Pitchfork” way, categorized the band’s rise as “burning up the internet like a vintage Lohan nipslip,” noting that hipsterdom’s Definitive Davids — Bowie and Byrne, specifically — were spotted at recent CYHSY shows. Before the year was out, “The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth” was prominently featured on an episode of The Office, “Email Surveillance” — the millennial overnight-sensation equivalent of PlaqueBoyMax plucking your SoundCloud upload for the stream. (In something of an unintentional full-circle moment, an official video for that specific song was just released featuring comedian Eric Rahill — who has already booked an appearance on Peacock’s forthcoming Office spinoff The Paper.)
As an entity, CYHSY’s trajectory post-debut is relatively familiar to anyone who’s followed the paths that one-or-two-time blog heroes have taken. After Some Loud Thunder, there was an undefined hiatus and several looser solo projects; in 2011, the project properly returned with a full-band effort Hysterical before Ounsworth soldiered on under the moniker as a solo endeavor. Fellow indie-friendly names — the National’s Matt Berninger, Centro-matic’s Will Johnson, turntablist Kid Koala — have occasionally popped into frame alongside him. (The most recent CYHSY record, 2021’s New Fragility, even dipped into self-reflexive territory with the meta-quasi-lament “CYHSY, 2005.”) Much like the first record, all of these releases have been just fine — unremarkable, maybe, but nothing in their contents that would scan as legacy-killing or, worse, outright embarrassing.
A much stronger and more notable constant in CYHSY’s discography is Ounsworth’s steadfast pursuit of largely self-releasing his work under the moniker from the very beginning, at least domestically. (Wichita handled the UK release of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Some Loud Thunder, with V2 joining in for the latter; New Fragility was his first under distribution and licensing deals with, respectively, Secretly and Domino.) If there were opportunities in the early years to take a bigger leap into risker, more ambitious business waters, he didn’t take them — and given the music industry’s eternally fickle practices, his seeming reluctance is admirable and quite possibly virtuous. There’s always value in knowing where you came from and what you’re capable of, and if the story of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is one of an artist who had some unexpected success, spun it into a reasonable fanbase, and was able to comfortably make music after the buzz died — well, there are certainly far worse stories to be told.
