Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Songkick HQ, London 16/05/14

19 May 2014, 13:00 | Written by Adam Elmahdi

(Live)

(Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)

The year was 2005. The Line of Best Fit was but a twinkle in our founder’s eye, the launch of YouTube heralded a proliferation of cat videos never before conceived by God or man, James Blunt had firmly secured his place in the ninth circle of Hell, and a younger, less cynical version of me was dispatched by his University newspaper to review the second-ever UK show by the new American buzz band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Alas, the gig was a disappointment. I’d loved their debut single “The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth”, but the band seemed under-rehearsed and Alec Ounsworth spent their whole hour-long set paralysed with nerves, staring fixedly at the sound-desk like a deer caught in a particularly strong headlight. Indeed, I described him (in retrospect, rather cruelly) as having “less charisma than the microphone he sung into.”

Fast-forward to 2014, and I’m watching Alec Ounsworth play an intimate set of CYHSY songs at the Hoxton headquarters of Songkick, the popular gig-listings website. It is happily an entirely more positive experience than nine years ago, not least because he no longer does comes across as someone who’d rather be punched repeatedly in the gonads than perform live.

There’s still a touch of awkwardness there, but it’s endearing rather than off-putting, and his former rigidity on stage has given way to an animated fidgeting which adds character to this acoustic performance. He’s also so much more communicative. In 2005, his sole word of acknowledgement to the sold-out crowd was “thanks”; this time, he fields questions from the audience, chats about his youthful excursions across Europe and generally makes a lot of effort to engage with those watching him.

Most importantly, the songs sounded great, even in stripped-down form. Obviously, it’s hard to form a definitive impression of his soon-to-be-released fourth album, Only Run, from such a minimalist set-up - it’s just Ounsworth with an acoustic guitar and harmonica- but what we heard certainly sounded very promising. His strangulated whine remains as potent and integral to CYHSY’s peculiar charm as ever, but his “regular” singing has become a lot more tuneful, to the net benefit of all. Plus, although the primary focus of the show was the new songs, there was still plenty of oldies to please the stalwart fans- including the superb “Is This Love” and, of course, “Yellow Country Teeth”.Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s singular style will never be to everyone’s tastes, but on the strength of this excellent performance, they’re worth celebrating more than ever.