Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: "Same Mistake"

When I first heard this song on the local college radio station, I thought the DJ was trying to put one over. The dense, swelling production; the busy, generic backbeat; the smooth and overly earnest vocal delivery: the guy was trying to pass off a Killers song for new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah material. But then, in the chorus, Alec Ounsworth gave himself away with one of those signature pre-pubescent voice cracks, and I had to accept that I really was getting a taste of what Clap Your Hands Say Yeah ‘s upcoming Hysterical will sound like. And whatever name might be printed on that album’s sleeve, there’s a very real sense in which this isn’t the same band that released Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (2005) and Some Loud Thunder (2007).

Despite being lumped together with a cohort of yelpy contemporaries, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah really didn’t sound much like anyone; superficial comparisons to the Talking Heads or Bowie were just easy ways of compartmentalizing the band by linking their jarring eccentricities with their ephemeral tenure as hipster darlings. Discussions of the band itself tended to focus on Ounsworth’s nasally warble and cryptic, rambling lyrics, but what made his songs work was the under-appreciated craftsmanship of his bandmates. At their best, the band showed a knack for novel distribution of sonic space and effective layering of textures; they gave each song a distinct identity and direction. It was the juxtaposition between the band’s subtle sense of harmonic development and Ounsworth’s brash vocal delivery that made their best work so effective.

On “Same Mistake” the band abandons these strengths. The vocal melody is pleasant enough but Ounsworth’s delivery just sounds neutered; is he trying to downplay those same tics that originally made his voice so weirdly likeable? There is no textural depth to speak of in the music, and the unorthodox instrumental arrangements of their earlier work are jettisoned in favor of a homogenous wall of guitars, drums, and strings. The result is moderately enjoyable, but bodes poorly for the future of CYHSY: insofar as they seem to be going forward on the assumption that evolution and mere change are equivalent, the band’s effort to bombastically reassert themselves in a scene that has all but forgotten them is likely to be undercut by their choice to abandon the trademarks that endeared them to that scene in the first place.