Some Loud Thunder, by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Every business has its clichés, the music business not the least of them. Among the most persistent in music is the idea of the “difficult second album”: the idea that while a first album might be a bolt from the blue, some kind of flash of divine inspiration, repeating that success (because we’re talking, of course, only about those few lucky bands or individuals who have some measure of success with their first album) is a grind that can wear down even the most talented artists. It’s not an idea unique to music: literary critics, too, are fond of talking about the difficulty of following up a stellar debut. The argument goes that an artist (writer, musician, whatever) has their whole life to produce that first artefact, but only a couple of years to come up with the next one.

There’s also, of course, the issue of expectation: when the genius of an artist’s first major work has been shouted from every hill and every rooftop, coming up with something else that replicates that fervour is, supposedly, an intense pressure. This is a pressure that the artist might place on themselves, out of their own desire not to disappoint anyone – but it’s just as much something that others impose upon the artist. I think it’s a kind of artificial pressure, in a way: not so much something that critics dream up to give themselves something to write about (or to save them the trouble of thinking up something new to write about) as a manifestation of those critics’ – or the public’s, let’s be fair – own desires for the artist. Of course, this is something that most artists will have great difficulty escaping throughout the course of their career: witness the disappointed comments that greeted Cat Power’s gorgeous album the Greatest, which some critics would have us believe “doesn’t sound like a Cat Power album”. This is a patently absurd argument: it sounds exactly like a Cat Power album, precisely because it is a Cat Power album. What it doesn’t sound like is a particular person’s idea of what a Cat Power album should sound like, but that’s not something that an artist should have to worry about. You can’t please everybody, as they say.

Of all the bands out there at the moment, the one you’d least expect to suffer “difficult second album” pressure is Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Oh, sure, all the classic ingredients are there, not least a raucously applauded debut album that seemed to pop up out of nowhere and take the world by storm (or the indie world, at any rate) and had just about everyone who listened to it gagging for more. The pressure must have been almost unbearable. But to a very great extent you only feel pressure if you allow yourself to feel it, and from the very beginning Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have shown every sign of not giving too much of a damn about what anyone else thinks. There’s that ridiculously unwieldy name, for starters. And the love-it-or-loathe-it singing style of Alec Ounsworth. And, most famously, the band’s D.I.Y. ethos (which serves to remind us all that punk, after all, is infinitely more significant as an attitude than as a sound). This is a band that gives every indication of just doing what they want to do, and to hell with the consequences. Fortunately for them, the consequences have been pretty good so far.

Still, there are all those fans to please, some of whose job it is to write the reviews that could make or break the band. The band’s attitude might have won them admirers, but it was their music that made those admirers (well, most of them) into fans. On their first album the attitude and the sound merged perfectly to create an album that was more sneer than angst, more shrug than anger, and more fun than a hell of a lot of other stuff that’s going around these day; sure, you can put on Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois and go on a tremendously moving emotional journey for an hour and a quarter, but you’re not going to get anyone to dance to it.

I don’t know what anyone really expected from the Clap Your Hands’ second album, Some Loud Thunder. I expect the vast majority of their fan base were wishing and hoping for more of the same – more flat-out fun that you didn’t have to be embarrassed to show your friends. But as to whether anyone actually expected that . . . Well, they probably did, because let’s be honest, the band didn’t show much else on their first album. Apart from the opening track, but I don’t think anyone was anticipating a whole album of faux-carnival spruiking. So more of the same would have suited us all just fine, thankyou.

Which might explain why the reaction when Some Loud Thunder came out was one of muted disappointment: the sound of thousands of indie music fans the world over trying to convince themselves that they liked the album more than they actually did. I know I was one of them. I love that first album, it pulled off the rare feat of jumping straight into the upper reaches of my favourite albums collection from the very first time I heard it – and with the number of albums I buy, that’s no mean trick – and, yes, when I first heard Some Loud Thunder I was disappointed. My disappointment was derived largely from the fact that, while it wasn’t the first album all over again, it seemed like it was trying to be: but there were too many slow songs which interrupted the fun, too many tracks that didn’t quite seem to resolve into anything. It just didn’t seem to hang together, those first few times I listened to it.

Sometimes, I guess, you just need to put an album aside for a while. Again, with the number of C.D.s (yes, C.D.s) I buy this is pretty easy to do. I haven’t even listened to the band’s first album in months, so what could motivate me to revisit an album I was kind of nonplussed by? But all the same, there was something there. Something about the album made me want to write this review (instead writing a review of the first album, which surely would have been a much easier task). All these months the album’s been lurking in the back of my mind, it seems, never quite letting me forget it’s there: and I haven’t been able to forget the album because whatever else the band might be perceived to have lost between their first and second albums, attitude certainly isn’t it.

Right now, for the purposes of this review, I’m listening to the album again, from the much-reviled recording of the title track to the slow, oceanic “Five Easy Pieces”. And I’m loving it. I’m thrilled and exhilarated by it. I’m still hearing the same songs, and I’m not exhausted from jumping around in my seat like I usually am after listening to the first album, but for the first time while listening to Some Loud Thunder I’m finding myself thinking: this is a really, really good album. Curiously, everything that had seemed a weakness at first now seems to me to be a strength: when the album first came out it seemed as if the band had bottled it, as if they’d choked on the pressure of their own surprise success. It seemed like the band couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted Some Loud Thunder to be Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Mk. II or some new kind of album altogether, so they decided to have a bet each way. And viewed like that, yes, the album is a disappointment, because inevitably it’s neither one nor the other. That was how I originally perceived the album.

But now I find myself thinking that maybe the album is exactly what the band intended it to be: just another album, no more, no less, just them doing what they wanted to do. Really, this should have been obvious to me from the start: the clue’s right there in the beginning, with the outrageously over-produced opening (title) track, which sounds basically like producer Dave Fridmann turned everything up to 11 then went to find something to eat. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only fan in the world who just loves this version of the song: maybe it’s because I haven’t heard the fabled “clean version” that was apparently floating around on the band’s MySpace or wherever, but there’s something so utterly uncompromising about the recording that I find it absolutely thrilling. (An aside: I wonder how many people who decried this recording of the song also adore, say, the tape-hiss and boombox-distortion on early Mountain Goats songs? If the song “Some Loud Thunder” had been recorded with “authentically” bad sound, would anyone complain?).

And ultimately, that’s what so excites me when I listen to Some Loud Thunder these days. No, it’s not as good an album as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, but to me it’s just as exciting – albeit, for somewhat different reasons. The first album was just so fun and so accomplished, and so unexpected, that it couldn’t help but delight (apart from those few people who always sniff about “influences”; for the record, I don’t hear any Talking Heads in Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: the former band was all paranoia and nervousness; the latter is all swagger and cocksureness). But the second album is the one that shows this band is going to keep doing things their way and nobody else’s; in other words, it’s the album that shows they might just be around for a while yet: although it might sound at first like a misstep, I now think quite sincerely that the album is in fact a bold stride from a band who has never shown any sign of doing anything they didn’t want to do. It may not be a better album than their debut, but it’s a much braver one. The band knows that people aren’t always going to follow them, but they’re walking in the direction they want to go all the same. Personally I can’t wait to see where their foot next falls.

- Harry Saddler.