Clap Your Hands Say Yeah may forever be pigeonholed as one of the first “blog bands.” Its self-titled, self-released debut became popular through word-of-blog acclaim upon arrival in 2005. The Philly/Brooklyn quintet, led by Alec Ounsworth, navigated the success well, but 2007’s Some Loud Thunder revealed that CYHSY was as interested in outsider weirdness as it was in indie-pop hooks. Yet it suffered a seemingly inevitable backlash from the fickle blogosphere, as did 2011’s Hysterical. In that LP’s aftermath, the band shed members and disappeared until late last summer, when Little Moments arrived. That four-song EP set the tone for the vibe that threads through Only Run, the new CYHSY album, which updates one of the EP’s songs as its title track. Ounsworth will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com. Read our new CYHSY feature.
Ounsworth: I don’t think I’m a true “collector” of maps, but they do intrigue me. I own several but don’t overdo it, I guess. For some reason (as I get older?), I am increasingly concerned with knowing where I am at this very moment (just outside of Philadelphia) and where I’ve been. I don’t take many photographs when I go away. Instead, I prefer then and later to consult a maps of, say, Berlin, find the corner of Potsdamer Strasse and Lutzostrasse, remember the Kumpelnest 3000, and drift to a particularly dark night (not long ago) that I shouldn’t remember at all but somehow do. My favorite map is of Napoleon’s march to Moscow, by Charles Joseph Minard. Unlike political maps, this one is more in the way of information graphics but good enough to throw out there as a related aside and something to put below …
