Indie band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s successes in the music world are an undeniable point of pride for Conn students. The famed collective of Conn graduates has been playing together and garnering massive amounts of critical acclaim for their DIY style since 2004. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s (CYHSY) sound could best be described as a speeding train of organized, high-energy chaos beneath lead vocalist Alec Ounsworth’s ’00 characteristic warbling wails.
Up until this long-awaited release, it was often difficult to isolate the individual lyrics being yowled out in all of the layers of sticky, busy instrumental clatter. Hysterical has brought the advent of a more streamlined CYHSY. The homemade charm has somewhat dissipated and given way to a much cleaner sound, a total departure from CYHSY’s past two LPs. It is abundantly clear with tracks like “Hysterical” and “Maniac” that CYHSY is being more careful and measured than they have ever been before. The record is restrained and finely engineered, but I find myself missing the twangy, loose noise they used to make.
A bright little album in its own right, this is not the wild parade of oddity that the group might have released five years ago. CYHSY has spent years trying to escape the speculation that they are all hype and no substance, and the audible safeness of their new sound comes off as a product of the band’s willingness to remain in the critics’ graces. There is a total lack of the experimentation and surprise that were once hallmarks of CYHSY’s sound and, quite frankly, the reason for their spike in popularity a few years ago. After a month-long hiatus in 2009, during which each member worked on producing, solo work or branching out into other projects, the five Conn College grads reconvened in New Jersey to begin work on Hysterical. They combined forces with producer John Congleton (David Byrne, The Mountain Goats, Polyphonic Spree) in the studio and with Maya Pindyck ’00, (graphic artist and wife of bassist Tyler Sargent ’00) on album cover possibilities.
Pindyck recalled how the cover art (a mixed media piece incorporating watercolors and pencil) came to be, explaining that she’d created the artwork years ago. “Robbie Guertin [keyboardist/guitarist] came over one day to look through my work with the [Hysterical] cover in mind and sifted through a number of my drawings and paintings,” she said. “We all agreed on a beautiful cover design. Thankfully, everyone in the band was on the same page.”
I’d love to say I’m on the same page as the group as far as their new direction goes. As a huge CYHSY fan, I’m hesitant to be critical of this new style, but at points it seems too foreign and spare. The album opens with “Same Mistake,” a teased-out but tamed-down synth-laced track reminiscent of “new” new wave. The title track, “Hysterical,” is a perfect example of where the album went wrong. A good song filed down into an ironically neat packet of angst, “Hysterical” contains a taste of the past but really lacks the bite that the listener craves. “In a Motel” and “Misspent Youth” are sleepy and more frugal with more instrumentation than I’d like, but the contemplative nature of both songs is appealing. By the time I get to the bonus tracks, I feel more than a little bit disappointed. I was pushing for a big flashy comeback as much as any proud Conn kid was. One of the album’s best songs, “Trotsky’s Fence,” offers the oddity and scrappy yelps that I love, which is probably the reason for its banishment to bonus trackdom. It’s too unkempt for the new CYHSY to show off. “Yesterday, Never” is the highest point of the album with its buoyant thicket of strings and grab bag of sparkly keyboard strains. Overall, Hysterical is content that simmers while past efforts Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Sound of Thunder crackle and burst.
