Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Tuning Fork: November 11, 2025 (13th Floor Concert Review)
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah played the Tuning Fork last night along with opener Beth Torrance...The 13th Floor’s Lawrence Mikkelsen files this report along with Brenna Jo Gotje’s photo.
Was there anything cooler in the early 2000s than being in an American indie band?
Post-grunge and post-Britpop, guitar music had lost its swagger. The NME was busy backing the so-called “new acoustic movement” – Travis, Coldplay, Starsailor and Elbow – all capable of penning a solid tune, but hardly the stuff of danger or charisma.
Then, seemingly overnight, came a new breed of wiry musicians in tight jeans and battered Converse, slinging guitars and attitude in equal measure. Labels went into a frenzy not seen since the grunge boom, and the music press worked itself into ecstasy, proclaiming this wave of new bands the “saviours of rock and roll” (whatever that was supposed to mean).
And if The Strokes were cosplaying as the new Velvet Underground, and fellow New Yorkers Interpol were their cooler, moodier cousins channeling the gloomy post-punk of Joy Division and The Chameleons then – despite being from Philadelphia – Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, who I’m at the Tuning Fork to see tonight, were “the new Talking Heads”.
Having first gained attention through those algorithm-free early online MP3 blogs, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (who I’ll hereafter refer to as CYHSY) quickly became regarded as one of THE definitive bands of the “blog rock” era, with their debut album receiving unanimous critical praise.
Tonight’s show is one of those “anniversary shows” celebrating the twentieth birthday of CYHSY’s self-titled debut album. To be honest, I have pretty mixed feelings about these “bands playing their most famous album” gigs. There’s an art to curating the perfect setlist, and the album-as-setlist approach removes any of that excitement, replacing it with a kind of weary anticipation, because you know exactly what’s coming next.
Still, the band’s debut was a pretty big deal in the mid-00s, coinciding with the massive popularity of MP3 blogs, and whilst their second album, Some Loud Thunder, gained a bit of traction, I imagine a bunch of audience tonight haven’t necessarily kept up with the band’s string of releases over the subsequent 18 years. For most of us, this was THE Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album.
Wikipedia tells me that the CYHSY “band” (brand?) is now largely a solo project for Alec Ounsworth, so I genuinely wasn’t sure whether tonight’s gig was going to be a solo gig or a full band affair. I arrived at 8:15pm, thinking I was early, only to see that the support act, Beth Torrance, had already been and gone (sorry Beth!) and that there was a drumkit and a couple of keyboards on the stage. Full band then.
The first sign that this wasn’t going to be an “ordinary” classic album gig was the pulsing keyboard and drums that started the set. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (the album) begins with one of the more jarring opening songs in my record collection, the discordant, faux-circus “step right up” song Clap Your Hands! (I actually kinda hate it). But this was not it, with Ounsworth opting instead to begin the set with the title track from the band’s second album, Some Loud Thunder, arguably a much better opener. Then we were plunged into the debut album. And that song I kinda hated? Live, it was transformed into something else entirely – less discordant, more punchy and melodic.
One of the many appealing aspects of tonight’s gig is Alec’s regular between song monologues. He’s charming and self-effacing, telling stories and ruminating. He seems to still genuinely love his debut, and doesn’t want this to just be a clinical by-numbers run though.
The highlight of the show for me was the final song on the CYHSY debut, Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood, and the accompanying story of how it was a “protest song” about the young American men killed in the military for someone’s idea of the greater good. And there’s nothing like winning over the hometown crowd with a story about how you love The Clean and Chris Knox. This guy? He gets us.
Once the “album” part of the show is over, we get “a funny song” – a (not remotely actually funny) cover of Johnny Thunders’ You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory, followed by a grab-bag of songs from the band’s extensive back catalogue. After a very brief encore-turnaround, there’s a sincere but ultimately abandoned attempt at a cover of Chris Knox’s Not Given Lightly. Alec has printed the lyrics out, but the poor light and his glasses means it’s hard for him to sing and play at the same time. There are shouts of encouragement from the crowd, but ultimately it collapses into chaos. A pity, although everyone sees the humour in it, and he ends the set with one of his own songs.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (the album) sounds very much like an album made on the cheap. But having had years to grow, those familiar songs are now longer, louder and more dynamic. Ounsworth admits this late in the set, bemoaning bands whose live shows sound too much like their recorded output – “It sounds like the record?” he says. “Why the fuck would I care about that?” Like many bands on the “nostalgia” circuit, they’re probably a better live band now than in their critical and commercial heyday.
It’s been two decades since CYHSY’s self-titled debut – a record now as distant from today as its own post-punk influences were when it first arrived. Despite twenty years having passed, and the zeitgeist of “blog rock” long having faded in our collective memory, we’re left with a set of angular art-rock pop songs that have stood the test of time. This ain’t nostalgia.
Lawrence Mikkelsen
Click on any image to view a photo gallery by Brenna Jo Gotje
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah:
Beth Torrance:
