Depending on your disposition, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are either a band to pity or one to envy. Their much-adored 2005 self-titled debut continues to tower over their entire subsequent discography, but then ringleader Alec Ounsworth seems more comfortable lurking in the shadows than basking in the spotlight. A glance at the band’s current touring itinerary reveals venues half the size of the ones they were headlining nine years ago, but Ounsworth is the sort of artist who’d rather play your living room than an arena. It seems like Ounsworth is exactly where he wants to be, having earned enough clout to, say, assemble Philadelphia indie-rock dream teams for his solo albums or live out his Tom Waits fantasies in New Orleans with some veteran funk session players in tow, while putting enough aesthetic distance between himself and that first Clap Your Hands album to ease the burden of expectation and follow whatever whim strikes his fancy. At this point, the ever-resourceful Ounsworth is beholden to no entity, save for the Bandcamp terms and conditions page.
But as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s fourth full-length Only Run illustrates, there’s a difference between feeling boundless and sounding rudderless. The album’s conception was preceded by the departure of three fifths of the band’s formative line-up, leaving just the core of Ounsworth and drummer Sean Greenhalgh. Accordingly, in sharp contrast to the streamlined sound of 2011’s Hysterical, Only Run has the feel of a band being reconstructed in real time, with an increased reliance on synthesizers, manipulated voice effects, sampled dialogue, and song fragments pieced together like unevenly aligned Lego blocks. The one constant through the CYHSY canon, of course, is Ounsworth’s excitable tremble of a voice, and, on an album-by-album basis (both within the band and without), he’s been eager to recast it in as many different contexts as possible. But Only Run often compacts this catholic approach into the span of a single song, with frustrating results.
While the circular drum pattern, synth-smeared ambience, and New Order-esque guitar lines of the opening “As Always” lend the track an ascendent grandeur that sounds more like a proper Dave Fridmann production than anything on the last album CYHSY recorded with him, in the final minute, the arrangement drops out to leave Ounsworth singing the verse melody on his acoustic guitar. It’s a classic songwriter ploy—to prove a tune is sturdy enough to stand on its own in the absence of studio embellishment—and, in this case, an effective one. But when the same trick is repeated on “Blameless” and the title track, wherein Ounsworth’s voice left to float in a desolate haze for extended stretches, the sense of structural randomness starts to feel like a crutch in and of itself.
And like a child playing dress-up with their parents’ wardrobe, Only Run’s impulsive change-ups can result in some ill-fitting looks: “Your Advice” aims for a Kid A-style deconstruction of a standard rock song, but the separation between Ounsworth’s clear-eyed, straight-forward melody and the ambient swirls floating behind it is so pronounced, it comes off like an unfinished remix with mismatched console levels. But even that seems complete compared to “Coming Down”, a trainwreck of a song that smashes together an overdriven fuzz-bass riff, melody-averse muttering, and a door-crashing cameo from Matt Berninger that feels less like a triumphant class-of-2005 reunion than him getting his decade-in-the-waiting revenge against CYHSY for upstaging the National on the latter's 2005 tour behind Alligator.
Fortunately, Only Run finally hits its stride in its more focussed second half, with Ounsworth and Greenhalgh strategically building upon simple ideas rather than trying to cram them together and see what happens. “Beyond Illusion” is essentially Only Run’s “Idioteque”, a drum-machined strut that retains its twitchy tension even as the mid-song appearance of Greenhalgh’s booming drums offer some levity. And if the unlikely collaboration with Kid Koala on the slow-motion sci-fi lullaby “Cover Up” proves anti-climactic, the shimmering “Impossible Request” yields the fully realized fruits of Only Run’s grab-bag experimentation, transmitting the band’s inherent ramshackle charm through an expanded palette of space-age sonics. But, of course, this being Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, bliss and balance can only ever be temporary states, as Ounsworth closes out “Impossible Request” with a promise-cum-threat worthy of being chiseled on his tombstone: “Please don’t ask me where I’m going… I’ll tell you again, I never know.” Though, at this point in Clap Your Hands’ perpettually zig-zagging career course, he need not ask us not to ask.
