Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Only Run

Little Moments didn’t feel like the product of a five-piece, and it certainly didn’t feel like the product of CYHSY, who even at their lowest with 2011’s over-polished and under-substanced Hysterical were largely a guitar-fueled affair. Yet there were no guitars on Little Moments, and any of that rebellious upstart energy seemed confined to a lack of familiarity with the instrumentation as little, four-note blips of melody flashed tumultuously with minimal lasting impact. Still, I ended the piece hopeful—Only Run was due in the not too distant future, and it seemed like just enough time to wrap their heads around what they were doing.

It seems I was right and wrong. Only Run has its high points, and it bears a lot more technical proficiency than Little Moments did, but those highs are sparse and underwhelming. Take the two EP cuts that made it to the album—“Little Moments” and title-track “Only Run”—while they showcase a better understanding of production in accordance with the band’s new sound, seeming somehow deeper, filling in the gaps between the notes where awkward silence once stood (silence, of course, is not inherently bad by any stretch, but it gave Little Moments somewhat of a hollow feel), they still fall lifeless within the confines of their own recording, with Ounsworth’s vocals frequently sounding quite humdrum and complacent throughout the record. Even his epileptic chants on “Coming Down” (which features guest vocals from The National’s Matt Berninger) strike as rather forced and subjugated, where they were once an instrumental piece of the band’s signature inane enthusiasm.

Only Run does deliver on one of my key worries from Little Moments: the inclusion of guitars. And while its sound is a distant stretch from the guitar-work of the band’s self-titled debut, or its divisive follow-up Some Loud Thunder, the melody-making is inherently CYHSY. Plucked notes strung together and stacked side-by-side in dueling rises and falls, layered and built to a buildup that, while scattered in sound, never veers from its intended feel.

And so it seems to be that the inherent vice of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah post-Some Loud Thunder is production value. Are they simply a band that thrives in lo-fi and suffers from clarity? Or was it their very limitations, paired with their upstart methodology of label-less self-distribution (a new idea in indie-rock at the time) that pushed the band to new heights? That much is tough to say. But while they’ve certainly sharpened some of the edges since Little Moments and brought their newfound gloom-and-synth-addled style to a more formidable shape, Only Run still suffers a significant lack of the sheer vibrancy and enthusiasm that made their off-kilter beginnings so invigorating.