CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH - Hysterical

Among the big reunions making so much noise these days – perhaps the latest ploy to keep the corpse of the record industry alive – that of these former young guns from the Big Apple, led by Alec Ounsworth, hasn't exactly set off fireworks. It's hard to imagine a bigger anti-climax: a band that fizzled out without much fanfare after a second album that failed to make much of an impact, and a frontman who tried his hand, without really grabbing the public's attention, at a singer-songwriter career.

It's precisely this total absence of expectations that, on the contrary, suggests the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah haven't come back just to rake in cash with nostalgia shows – a legitimate move, and indeed an advisable one, even if it wouldn't amount to much artistically, to be honest.

If the crooked miracle of their self-titled debut remains impossible to replicate, the Brooklyn band delivers an album that is anything but "hysterical" or unruly, even if it can't be called entirely resigned in its intentions. It's a full-bodied, thunderous record, as in the Killers-style anthem "Same Mistake", with all the synth violence imaginable trying to breathe new life into tracks with melodies as predictable as the title track.

A few scraps of the fragile poetry, the anxious melancholy of "Clap Your Hands Say Yeah", surface faintly in "Maniac" and "Yesterday, Never", before vanishing beneath volleys of drums, an impassable wall built to hide the emptiness. The only track that seems to modestly hold back from the sonic circus the band has put together is "Misshapen Youth", a story that's nonetheless fairly stereotypical, not unlike Ounsworth's nocturnal lament. No more rusted goddesses or houses on the ice, in short.

It may not exactly be a timed-to-order reunion, but as their recent shows have shown, "Hysterical" feels mostly like an attempt to get back on track, by whatever means necessary. A band in recovery, trying to find its way again.

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01/10/2011