Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Just ten months after the UK release of the debut Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album, the quintet, based around Philadelphian songwriter Alec Ounsworth, are set to return in January 2007 with their hotly anticipated follow-up. This sheen-free wonder captures everything that made the band such a breath a fresh air when their debut first hit these shores in late 2005.
Recorded in summer 2006, between international festivals and headline shows, including the sold out Forum, London in July (which went ballistic), the new record was completed in Tarbox Studios in upstate New York with producer Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev’s Deserters Songs, Flaming Lips The Soft Bulletin and Sleater Kinney’s final rallying cry The Woods). The album merrily sidesteps any 'second album syndrome' schoolboy errors, and steams confidently ahead with the irresistible hooks and memorable songwriting that has already seen CYHSY taken to heart by a devoted worldwide fanbase. This is a heady and vastly different brew.
Having sold 300,000 albums and charted in ten countries across Europe and the UK via a licensing deal with the independent label Wichita Recordings, CYHSY remain unsigned in the US, instead using Alternative Distribution Alliance (ADA) to manufacture and distribute their albums in North America. Needless to say, this is an extraordinary situation for such a successful band!
Having just completed four weeks of sold out American shows, and following the triumph of playing to 5000 people in Central Park in the summer, the band are currently in Japan and will return to Europe and the UK for live dates in early 2007.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are due to take part in the Bob Dylan tribute evening at the Avery Fisher Hall in New York alongside such luminaries as Patti Smith and Sonic Youth on November 9. On the back this, they will also perform to a sold out auditorium of 3,000 people on New Year's Eve at New York City's prestigious Hammerstein Ballroom.
We welcome them back with open arms.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is Alec Ounsworth (vocals/guitar) and Lee Sargent (guitar/keyboards), his twin brother Tyler Sargent (bass/backing vocals), Robbie Guertin (guitar/keyboards) and Sean Greenhalgh (drums).