Since their 2005 debut, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have evolved from being an actual band into being just an idea of one. Once a proper quintet, they’ve gradually shed members over the past decade, and after drummer Sean Greenhalgh bailed following 2014’s Only Run, the group was down to one man clapping—lead singer/songwriter Alec Ounsworth. Of course, Ounsworth has been the band’s creative center since the very beginning, and even though he’s released music under his own name, he’s held onto the Clap Your Hands brand—as much for its obfuscating qualities as recognition value. Always too cryptic and theatrical a raconteur to fit the traditional singer-songwriter mold, Clap Your Hands is Ounsworth’s means of holding up a funhouse mirror to it, through restless, combustible songs as elastic and exaggerated as his voice.
But even though his original band has effectively fallen apart, Ounsworth has some quality Krazy Glue in the form of Dave Fridmann. The producer has a history of stabilizing bands in a state of flux, whether charting the Flaming Lips’ course out of “Jelly”-ville, or promoting himself from Mercury Rev’s bassist to their studio-bound sonic architect in the mid-’90s. Fridmann has worked on two very different Clap Your Hands records, both of which bore the pressure of the band’s circumstances at the time: 2007’s infamously cluttered and blown-out Some Loud Thunder was an unsubtle pin-prick to the inflated anticipation that followed their debut; the deconstructed, discombobulated Only Run captured the sound of a shrinking band trying to figure out where to go next. Like the latter record, The Tourist was self-produced by Ounsworth and mixed by Fridmann, but Only Run’s sense of blank-canvas uncertainty has been replaced with renewed confidence, focus, and contentment.
The result is the most consistently satisfying Clap Your Hands album since their debut. Ounsworth’s once-adversarial songwriting smarts and sonic ambitions are more in sync than ever before, and Fridmann’s lustrous mix ranges between the intimate and the epic. The Tourist furthers Only Run’s predilection for synth-smeared textures, but the songs here feel less like randomized experiments and more purposefully constructed for dramatic effect: “A Chance to Cure” begins in an ambient, after-hours R&B haze but erupts into a blast of psychedelic funk, powered by a hiccupping drumbeat that locks in with Ounsworth’s rap-like repartee; “Down (is where I want to be)” is a delirious disco in the spirit of “Satan Said Dance,” spiked with Eno-esque harmonies and a surprising rock-out climax that transforms it into the first Clap Your Hands song to make you pump your fist.
Ounsworth has said The Tourist was written during a period of personal tumult, and his lyric sheet here is riddled with references to ambulances, drugs, “visiting hours,” and “dark flowers.” But he works through his woes with sly humor. The charming, organ-poked waltz “Unfolding Above Celibate Moon (Lost Angeles Nursery Rhyme)” sees Ounsworth declare, “it’s no good trying to be someone you’re not,” before building a couplet from quotes of the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and Broken Social Scene’s “I’m Still Your Fag.” And atop the glistening glide of “Better Off,” he confronts an existential crisis (“It’s better to keep moving/Better just to hold still”) with zen-like bliss, rendering a scene of interpersonal turmoil by cribbing the “hit me with a flower” quip from Lou Reed’s “Vicious.”
In spite of The Tourist’s surface shimmer, Ounsworth still wields his frail voice like a weapon, dramatically punctuating his lines with hysterical tics like someone feigning a fainting episode to get out of an uncomfortable situation. But they’re also natural responses to moments when he’s just too overcome with emotion. The heart-rending “Ambulance Chaser” surges forth like an acoustic complement to “In This Home On Ice,” its fidgety rhythm emblematic of the unsettling medical drama unfolding in Ounsworth’s motor-mouthed lyrics (“There’s a limit to how much I can endure/I’ll take my medicine and you’ll just hope for the worst”).
The revitalizing vigor of The Tourist suggests that whatever troubles were plaguing Ounsworth are now behind him, with the post-punk thrust of “The Vanity of Trying” putting the exclamation point on the album’s liberation philosophy when he exclaims, “We can be whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever we want!” A decade ago, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were a modest, rickety band bearing the albatross of hype; today, they’re an amorphous, musically adventurous entity basking in the freedom of no expectations.
