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: After hearing Another Green World, I set out to discover most everything Eno had worked on, as well as those albums anyone who happened to appear on it (Phil Collins, John Cale, Robert Fripp, to name a few) were involved with. Here Come The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Before And After Science, along with his work on albums by Talking Heads, Devo, David Byrne, David Bowie, Roxy Music, U2, Robert Wyatt, etc., as well as much of his later solo work (e.g., Another Day On Earth)—almost everything Brian Eno touched came to more or less directly influence my approach to how an album should be constructed. Maybe I wrote about this album the last time I guest edited for MAGNET? Oh well … I’m doing it again.
