Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: "Hysterical"

“Hysterical” is a great new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah song. I saw them perform it live at a London venue recently—we were sloshed on beer, CMG editor-at-large Nool and I, the two of us absolutely engaged in not really focusing on the fuck was happening on stage because the stage, on our end, was three-quarters blocked by a bog-green amp sort of pelted into the ground. It’d been glittered in silver spray across the front, like vajazzle but noisier. So we couldn’t see the stage, but whatever the fuck was happening on it sounded really great—amp fuzz notwithstanding. Clap Your Hands started inauspiciously with an instrumental off their self-titled debut album before launching into “Same Mistake,” the first single off their gearshifting, quite fantastic new record Hysterical.

The reaction? Disappointingly tepid. In fact, it wasn’t until the band blasted out the title track of their new album that things really got going. It’s a beautifully jangly number that has Alec Ounsworth sounding like a twisted intestine and “trembling like an emasculated dog.” It sounds, to say the least, a bit different for them. This band is not growing on the dung of indie rock anymore. “Hysterical” is straight The Bends (1995)-era Radiohead, an unabashed throwback to the days of Britrock, all migrating guitar leads with a real crunch to the chorus. I mean, it sounded fucking awesome. So the crowd predictably went nuts, fist-pumping, Alec Ounsworth’s reconstructed squeal sent back at him by a couple hundred die-hard fans screaming along; they’d downloaded the leak, been tormented by the change in sound but already revised the lyrics, believed the lyrics, spat the lyrics—the lyrics were set to a somersaulting melody. They went nuts, but who were “they”?

A goatish forty-something with tufts of white devil hair sprouting behind his ears stood in front of me; he put me in mind of the pent-up, suited guys I’ve seen holding their girlfriends’ hand at Wilco concerts, mouthing along in a grope of expensive flashing lights. Actually he reminded me of Nool, who was wearing a suit, so I deliberately spilled/threw half my beer on its outer layer to make him peel that part off—didn’t want to see him naked; just suit-less—and initially he was angry with me. “What?”, he turned to me and said semi-shoutingly-quietly, because when you’re thirty and lawyer-ish like Nool so lovably is, the only way to express real anger is through carefully omitting those traces from your speech that might be construed as real anger. “What the fuck are you doing spilling beer on my expensive suit, cheech?” was not said, but rather implied by the way his eyebrows bent into the shape of two oviducts, his eyes two fried black ovaries hanging underneath.

I guess I’m saying that, in this moment, Nool’s face looked like a uterus swollen with anger that resembled a disturbed foetus. So he was being reborn from staid lawyer-dom. Even his five o’clock shadow turned a sort of young salmon-pink. He’d taken off his sopping wet jacket. Immediately he perked up; he realized that rather than defile his clothing what I’d done was shave, rather cannily, thank you very much, ten or more years off his perceived gig age. He was no longer in the same age band as the goatish white-haired man, but slumming it with me and the other young bucks hooting, stomping, and doing little cute finger-dances to the many, many great bass lines in the CYHSY back catalogue. The people in immodest earrings, unchaste Nirvana t-shirts with philandering nipples that grazed my arms, before I raised them to clap my hands and, yes, say yeah. Then “Hysterical” ended, and I told Nool, “I’m sorry,” which for a person of my age and inclination just means: “I’m going to write about this later. I’m sorry.”