Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Pack 'Em In

There's a bit of a paradox going on in music journalism right now. Critics are going positively insane over their new favourite bands, only to become bewildered when those bands become hugely popular and their shows are attended more by the excitable preppy kids as opposed to the hipsters. Take Pitchforkmedia.com's review of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's show in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In it, the writer examined the two aforementioned groups at the show and how the latter seem to despise the former. Funny though it may be that the website that essentially launched the band would come back to complain that they've created a monster, that contrast was in full effect during CYHSY's Saturday night show at the Opera House.

One of the funniest parts of the Pitchfork review was when the writer recounts the point at which a guy who looks like he's fallen out of an Old Navy commercial attempts a stage dive (that ends in spectacular failure). This nearly happened again, much to my own surprise. During set opener "Let The Cool Goddess Rust Away," a similarly oblivious guy got up on stage, stood behind singer Alec Ounsworth and raised his hands to get the audience to applaud. He wisely stopped short, however, of making the leap.

Other than that bizarre moment and the Opera House's typical sound deficiencies, Clap Your Hands' hour-long set provided the packed room with a tight yet not entirely thrilling set featuring most of the songs on their self-titled debut and a number of new songs. "Is This Love?" was the singalong number of the night, while "Over And Over Again" and "The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth" kept the throng of new fans yelling and cheering.

The big surprise was that the new songs functioned better in a live setting than most of the tracks on their debut. Chief among these were "Satan Said Dance," a sparse and haunting tune that depicts Hell as a mindless dance party (funny, that's what I always imagined a night at MuchMusic's Electric Circus would be like), and encore song "Me And You Watson," a rocker that elicited the same kind of cheers reserved for the band's best-known tracks.

Ounsworth said little during the night, which is disappointing since he seems like the kind of guy who has something to say. But there was one significant personal touch. After a superb run-through of their best song, "Heavy Metal," Clap Your Hands played Neil Young's "Helpless" to close the show.

Seeing Clap Your Hands at the Horseshoe last September was one of the highlights of my fall and the bigger room took much of the thrill away. But as for the critics' conundrum about small bands getting big too fast, who cares? Let musicians get as big as they can; that way they'll keep making the music you love. And if that means co-existing with the guy who feels he has to get on stage and touch the band to prove his love, so be it.