CYHSY: Some Loud Thunder
My first reaction upon listening to the first song of the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album: This bootleg sounds awful. I wish I had the actual CD ... oh, I do.
This is on purpose their publicist confirmed, but it just sounds like a decent song buried in really bad production. Fortunately, though, by track 2, they've gotten over the "extreme lo-fi" (and so have I). For the rest of the album, the sound is more fuzzed-out Kinks-y than "it would have sounded nice if they hadn't recorded in an alleyway with a microphone that they found in a garbage can."
And I really like it. Lead singer Alec Ounsworth, who in the past I thought had kind of a Billy Corgan whine, does a kind of David Bryne impression here (esp. on "Mama, Won't You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning?").
The band played a well received secret show last night in anticipation of their album dropping on Tuesday.
-- Emily Hulme, www.amNY.com
