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Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Some Loud Thunder

Self Released | 2006 | Album

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The Philadelphia bred/Brooklyn-living band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is back on the scene with an album that finds the DIY kings covering some new ground. If you thought the band’s solid self-titled debut was a fluke, Some Loud Thunder should easily prove the opposite even if it does leave you scratching your head at times. The songs on the group’s sophomore disc have the shiny pop sound of Supertramp and Elton John circa “Bennie and the Jets” even if the subject matter is often on the gloomy side. Over the course of 11 tracks, the indie rockers sketch mini-music portraits that give off a growing feeling of malaise.

Whether they spend their time ruminating over heavy subjects like the U.S.’s reputation overseas (Yankee, go home / the gas prices are getting higher) on the pop-flavored “Yankee Go Home” or dreaming of escape “beneath a velvet sky” on the whimsical “Under Water (You and Me)”, the group has obviously reached a place where they feel free to explore and take risks. They may not always get the result they intended, but at least they’re not taking the easy way out.

For every track you’re bound to fall in love with like the back-yard party tune “Some Loud Thunder” there’s a lethargic one like “Five Easy Pieces” or a just “What were they thinking? / How does this fit?” song like the sad circus sounds coming from “Upon Encountering the Crippled Elephant”. While this disc probably won’t stir up the kind of blogger hysteria that their first album did, it’s not an embarrassment either. The picture of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah presented here is of a band that is a work in progress rather than a fully-formed, hot off the presses second coming – and you know what? They’re okay with that!

Amy Wagner