I had been looking forward to seeing Clap Your Hands Say Yeah for a while now. I listened to them a lot in high school and i thought seeing them would bring about some nice feeling of nostalgia. After seeing them, I was not dissatisfied, but in some ways I was disappointed.
The Royale Theatre was sparsely populated that evening, which accounted for the underwhelming response from the audience and band alike. Despite the lack of apparent energy, the sound was spot on. The band played through several songs from their new album Hysterical as well as several classics from their first album, including “Details of the War” and “Over and Over Again.” Their progression as a band was most evident in the vocals of lead singer Alec Ounsworth, who breathed new life into older songs while showing an incredible amount of depth and control in his vocal delivery. The band played with the tightness of a group that has been on many gigs together, and every sound was clear and distinct.. The band members themselves seemed to appreciate the general chemistry of the group, as their energy increased as their set progressed. Needless to say, the band sounded good.
Despite their sound, the performance left something to be desired. At first i attributed it to a lack of motion, but that wasn’t the whole story. As the show went on, it became more and more obvious that the band didn’t really want to be there. There was an air of reluctance in every movement, which progressed only to contentment and not excitement. This may have had something to do with the disappointment of finding such a small audience in a major city, or it perhaps that the band has finally exhausted itself. Regardless of the cause, it was apparent that something was missing the whole time.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah was one of the first bands to get big off of myspace. Despite critical reception and acclaim from other artists, they failed to hold the attention of the masses for a long enough time (their most recent album has their lowest chart ranking yet.) Bands like this show that in modern popular music, it’s not enough to simply sound good – you need to excite and captivate audience. Take the example of Odd Future, who sound terrible live, but manage to create an experience so visceral that everybody leaves happy and full of adrenaline. We look to artists now as something more than soundmakers: they are personalities realized in music. In this sense I was disappointed by CYHSY, not because they were not exciting but because they didn’t force me to care. I would go to see them again only out of personal sentiment, with a hope that that the legacy of this great band is not yet over.