Clap Your Hands Say Yeah at Mezzanine

October 14, 2005 by David Blackman

Intermission is not hip. We have not reviewed or even name checked the indie blog-induced sensation that is Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! We apologize. We will rectify this.

A quick CYHSY bio and review before the actual concert review. They are an indie band, mostly from Brooklyn, New York who managed to hit it so big in the music blogging community that they sold 20,000 copies of their self-titled self-released album. These guys are that good. As far as I'm concerned, it's the best album of the year. Talking Heads meet Bob Dylan and decide to form an indie band. That's all you need to know.

CYHSY, like many people I know, make terrible first impressions. The album opens with a two-minute obnoxious atonal affair that sounds like a chorus of souls in hell singing over a carousel organ. It's only saved by the next track: "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth." It opens with a riff that makes me think they're about to launch into a cover of "Mr. Brightside." Another track, "In This Home On Ice," reminds me of every song Maximo Park has recorded.

I didn't expect to make it into this show. The club was 21+, and I, sadly, do not turn 21 for another month. But I had to see this show. I'd missed too many shows in the past month and my indie cred was suffering because of it. The bouncer looked at my ID for an uncomfortably long time and then let me in. Success.

Birdmonster opened the show. Their lead singer comes from the Jack White school of singing, where songs start out as tender ballads and end with whiskey-throated singing over power chords. Not that this is a bad thing. He also vaguely resembles a guy at Stanford named Baiju. The best part of their set was the pure joy radiating from the band. They had clearly never played a gig this large (500 people?) and the lead singer had such a large grin on his face that he occasionally had trouble forcing his mouth to curve around the words he was singing.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! played next. The scene: Alec, the lead singer, was so strung out he could barely keep his eyes open and looked at the microphone with unbridled disgust. Three other members of the band, all amazingly old for their genre, stayed mute and immobile for the rest of the show. The last and youngest member of the band, one of two multi-instrumentalists, and the only one wearing a t-shirt with the band's whimsical line art drawings was smiling a clenched teeth smile that looked like he'd been forced into it at gunpoint. He kept looking over at Alec to make sure he was still standing upright and was singing at least vaguely into the microphone. I got the sense that if that guy had stopped smiling the band would instantaneously fall apart, dropping their instruments to the ground and walking away from music forever.

Alec looked and sounded like he hated singing these songs and was bored as hell on stage. To him I say: You're a national sensation, the best hope for independent self-distributed music and everyone loves you -- your life isn't that fucking hard. I predict he'll be dead from a heroin overdose in six months.

Even with that disclaimer, the band sounded great.

The National was the headliner, but half the club left after CYHSY. I only stayed for five songs (hey, it was a school night), but they were great. Very glam rock. Imagine huskyvoiced Bowie if he were more French and more fey. The band has been around since 2001 and as a result their show was a lot more polished than either of the openers, coming in as a happy medium between the joy and boredom of the prior two.

The National was the headliner, but half the club left after CYHSY. I only stayed for five songs (hey, it was a school night), but they were great. Very glam rock. Imagine huskyvoiced Bowie if he were more French and more fey. The band has been around since 2001 and as a result their show was a lot more polished than either of the openers, coming in as a happy medium between the joy and boredom of the prior two.