The majority of unsigned bands never have their failure to upend the music industry held against them, but… you already know the deal with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. The excitement surrounding their 2005 self-titled debut and its DIY success was certainly warranted, but two years later, blogs were still grasping at straws for the sake of “firsties,” bands still wanted to get signed, and CYHSY’s wildly uneven follow-up Some Loud Thunder all but acknowledged its impending backlash as a given. It was an alternately awkward and rewarding record, but at the very least, a heartening show of artistic gumption in light of hype-bubble peers such as Sound Team, Birdmonster, and Voxtrot essentially turning tail upon encountering the slightest bit of real scrutiny. And yet, after a five-year, self-imposed hiatus that’s been described as something of a fact-finding mission for their true identity, Hysterical freely casts Clap Your Hands Say Yeah as the very thing their detractors inaccurately claimed them to be so long ago: a band whose story is the most interesting thing about them.
Truth is, Hysterical feels self-conscious from the moment you press play. In that inimitable avian squawk of his, Alec Ounsworth crows, “we’ll make the same mistakes,” and it’s hard not to see it as winking irony since they’re doing the exact opposite: Unlike their previous two records, Hysterical’s opener doesn’t boast some sort of abrasive production tactic meant to trigger instant buyer’s remorse. In fact, “Same Mistake” actually sounds fantastic and emphasizes the elements of their sneaky anthemic streak– Ounsworth’s broad vocal strokes, a brisk rhythm of splashy, 16th-note hi-hats and insistently strummed guitars, all coated in a wash of synthesized strings that soothes like aftershave. It’s instantly likeable, it can also just as easily be tuned out completely, and there are 11 others of its kind here.
As hard as it is to believe that anything featuring a vocalist of Ounsworth’s piercing timbre can be considered background music, Hysterical is almost hypnotic in its unerring consistency. You hire John Congleton as a producer, and you’re all but guaranteed to sound amazing, but compared to his some of his well-known charges (St. Vincent, Bill Callahan, Shearwater), CYHSY work within a far narrower range of dynamics, tone, tempo, and instrumentation– they sound like a more high-rent version of themselves, revealing how much ramshackle charm played a part in their debut, and that even the most jarring experiments from Some Loud Thunder were for their own good. If you’ve got a jones for no-qualifiers-necessary indie rock ca. 2005, you can get a proper fix from the title track, “Idiot”, and “Yesterday, Never”, where snares snap in double time, chords resolve in the most predictable fashion, and Ounsworth’s melodies stride and stutter-step through familiar patterns. Still, it’s tough to tell whether they impress on their own merits or whether they obtain some sort of halo effect due to their hard proximity to “The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth”.
So you’re left to grasp for trimming: the horn charts on “Maniac” that shed Hysterical’s rhythmic straitjacket and hearken to Ounsworth’s New Orleans fetish from Mo Beauty, the humid Mellotron strings and puzzling melody on the lonely “In a Motel”, the gnarled guitar that corkscrews it way through the middle of “Into Your Alien Arms”. But if you cut Hysterical, what does it bleed? At the very least, you’d think “Ketamine and Ecstasy” or “Misspent Youth” would offer some sort of insight based on titles alone, and judging by a teasing Eurythmics quote or a stray line about “trading sex for drugs,” maybe they do. But the words themselves rarely linger for effect, instead getting smeared over by Ounsworth’s oily melismatics and distended diction.
Look, even those who fell hard for “In This Home on Ice” or “Is This Love?” wouldn’t be too surprised by the way things would turn out by 2011– Clap Your Hands Say Yeah may have a confrontational edge about them, but outside of straight-up indie rock, they’re not the types you’d confuse for firebrands. The disappointment is in how it sounds like their years apart have needlessly chastened them into fast-forwarding through the idiosyncratic streak they showed on Some Loud Thunder instead of embracing it, coming out of the wilderness only to end up smack dab in the middle of the road.