Description:
The first time you listen to Some Loud Thunder, the second album from Brooklyn's Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, is a pretty weird experience. Oh, sure, many of the band's key hallmarks - hallmarks that made their self-titled debut a name to drop for everyone from David Bowie to influential indie webzine Pitchfork are present and correct: shambolic guitar jangle, drums that patter around like confused puppies, and the undulating outsider yelp of vocalist Alex Ounsworth. But this is a very different record to its predecessor, one that forsakes much of the band's deranged sing-along charm in favour of offbeat experimentation and peculia
The first time you listen to Some Loud Thunder, the second album from Brooklyn's Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, is a pretty weird experience. Oh, sure, many of the band's key hallmarks - hallmarks that made their self-titled debut a name to drop for everyone from David Bowie to influential indie webzine Pitchfork are present and correct: shambolic guitar jangle, drums that patter around like confused puppies, and the undulating outsider yelp of vocalist Alex Ounsworth. But this is a very different record to its predecessor, one that forsakes much of the band's deranged sing-along charm in favour of offbeat experimentation and peculiar production techniques. It's hard to shake the impression that the presence of Flaming Lips producer Dave Friedmann is sometimes a destabilising influence: "Emily Jean Stock" could, you feel, be neatly orchestrated '60s Technicolor beat-pop, but its distorted drums and thin production leave it feeling drab and grey. Persist, though, and there are some great songs here: the pulsing freak-disco of "Satan Said Dance", or "Yankee Go Home" - an apparent anthem to anti-Americanism that rises in awkward, yet oddly elegaic crescendos. --Louis Pattison
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Manufacturer: V2
Release date: 29 January 2007
EAN: 5055036261173
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