Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood

Last night the Showbox may have been ripe with B.O., but it was not nearly as crowded as we were expecting for the first of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's two sold-out shows. Tuesday's event was all-ages, so there Seattlest was, on the floor, amongst the kids. The energetic crowd was a broad swath of CYHSY fans, but overall very unhipsterly---this is most certainly a good thing. There were still some belts over tunics and leggings present, but also some untucked button-down shirts, and at least two *shudder* backwards baseball caps (at least they weren't white).

Clap Your Hands have been touring pretty consistently for over a year now, and it's clear that their confidence has grown, along with the tightness of their live performance. They kicked off their slightly longer than an hour set with a new song, a ballsy and often risky move for a young band, but when you've got an upbeat audience totally psyched for your set, it's assured to go over fine. That being said, the show really got started with the next song "Is This Love?," the crowd singing along with the "oh-oh-oohs." From there, CYHSY traversed nearly all of their self-titled debut, plus a few new tracks, two of which were new when we heard them last fall at the Croc and Neumo's. A year later, "Satan Said Dance" has evolved into an full-fledged rave-up worthy of its name, especially given the evil red lighting and near-epilepsy-inducing use of strobe. Actually though, we thought we'd get to hear more new tracks than were played last night, considering they have a new album coming out sometime this winter (the early word is late January-ish). Of course, the crowd's biggest response was for the closest thing Clap Your Hands has to a hit "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth."

Lead singer Alec Ounsworth's voice is still endearingly, nasally ugly and tic-full, but at this point perhaps he’s gone a little too far. We could do without the near-yodeling, and occasionally we like to be able to make out the lyrics. But what he lacked in terms of elocution, he made up for with energy and harmonica, especially on "Details of the War," which built nicely from its slow ballad beginnings to its harmonicatastic conclusion. CYHSY closed with a version of "Heavy Metal" that was more ragged and perhaps superior to the one found on the album, and with that, the band left us (and the rest of crowd) quite happy. We clapped; we said "yeah."

Photo care of Flickr / user kexplive.