Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

What are we to make of the world? In many ways, the title New Fragility perfectly sums up our collective state of unease and anxiety, but it's particularly apt for singer songwriter Alec Ounsworth AKA Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and the trauma he's spent the best part of three years processing. InchIt's pretty personal, Inch says Ounsworth. InchIt's about what I think we're all experiencing at the moment, certainly here in the United States anyway - trying to move forward amidst an almost cruel uncertainty.Inch Taken from the David Foster Wallace short story 'Forever Overheard', from the collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men - InchYou have grown into a new fragility, Inch says the story's adolescent narrator - the title track documents what happens directly after a long relationship comes to an end, and what's discovered soon after. InchThere comes a period of making up for lost time in a changed world, Inch says Ounsworth, Inchand now is a time of predictable stupidity.Inch InchI never want to take another chance on anyoneInch, Ounsworth laments over a steady chug of muted guitar chords, delicate piano, and bustling drums. InchI can't believe the things I do to myselfInch. It's a song that takes a long, hard look at itself in the mirror and doles out some uncomfortable truths. Yet it also showcases what Ounsworth has become so masterful at - couching a certain level of seriousness in something fun. Something danceable. It's what's powered some of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's most memorable moments, and what makes New Fragility such an accomplished, affecting record. Powerful too, taking aim at what Ounsworth calls Inchthe failed democratic experiment that is the United States of AmericaInch and the supine hypocrisy of those currently in government. The first singles taken from New Fragility, the double A-side of 'Hesitating Nation' and 'Thousand Oaks', are deeply p

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Tourist - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is back with an incredibly infectious new song called InchFireproof.Inch It's the first single from the band's upcoming full-length, The Tourist, due out Feb. 24m 2017. InchFireproofInch is a thumping, synth-heavy look at how naive people can be. InchI know it's hard to win,Inch sings frontman Alec Ounsworth. InchBut how could I have thought that we'd ever lose.Inch It is really a be-careful-what-you-wish-for kind of song,Inch Ounsworth tells NPR Music in an email. InchI'm starting to accumulate these, in the sense that it explores the idea of trying to win people over and then, once you have, trying to let them go. To be 'fireproof' in this context is to be dangerously self-confident - to have the capacity to try almost anything. The regret comes later.Inch The Tourist is the first new album from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah since 2014's Only Run. Album Tracks 1. The Pilot 2. A Chance to Cure 3. Down (Is Where I Want to Be) 4. Unfolding Above Celibate Moon (Los Angeles Nursery Rhyme) 5. Better Off 6. Fireproof 7. The Vanity of Trying 8. Loose Ends 9. Ambulance Chaser 10. Visiting Hours

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah has stockpiled a mass of oft-trampled influences, including what amounts to a 12-course meal of in-vogue '80s acts. What's interesting is the manner in which the players assemble this source material. The Cure and the Smiths, for instance, are probed for neither nostalgic angst nor fashion cues. The Reagan-era creepiness that often surfaces when contemporary acts dabble in such sounds in curtailed by Clap Your Hands' apparent affinity for the Clean and other indie slouchers, to say nothing of the harmonica strapped in front of singer Alec Ounsworth's mouth. (Republicans play keyboards, but it takes a socialist to pull of the consecrated harmonica holder.) - Jay Ruttenberg Timeout NY. Album Tracks 1. Clap Your Hands! 2. Let the Cool Goddess Rust Away 3. Over & Over Again (Lost & Found) 4. Sunshine & Clouds (And Everything Proud) 5. Details of the War 6. The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth 7. Is This Love? 8. Heavy Metal 9. Blue Turning Gray 10. In This Home on Ice 11. Gimme Some Salt 12. Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood