Clap Your Hands Say Yeah celebrate the 20th anniversary of their landmark self-titled debut album with an epic world tour and exclusive new reissue! The first leg of the global headline run gets underway with North American dates beginning at 9:30 Club on Monday, March 31.
The 20th anniversary of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is commemorated with a special new reissue, arriving on limited-edition vinyl LP on the band’s own label via Secretly Distribution, the defiantly independent home of Alec Ounsworth’s music for over two decades. The celebration officially got underway with a premiere of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s original 2004 version of the fan favorite, “Heavy Metal,” available everywhere now.
Recorded live at Pawtucket, RI’s Machines with Magnets Studios, the newly remixed and mastered track was recently discovered among the original project files and captures what Clap Your Hands Say Yeah founder and frontman Alec Ounsworth calls “a special moment in time — a young group of guys all piling into one hotel room to wake up and go to a real studio (!) to try to come up with something special just for the fun of it.”
“I guess I didn’t think this original version of ‘Heavy Metal’ sat very well on the album once we started recording some of the later songs (‘The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth,’ ‘Is This Love?,’ etc.) so I decided the song should be changed even though the original (as a standalone single) had always worked. Now that I listen to the original ‘Heavy Metal’ remixed and mastered, I realize it very well could (should?) have been on the album itself,” Alec said.
Stream “Heavy Metal (Original Version)” by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah on YouTube:
Few bands have burst quite so brilliantly onto the scene as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Fewer still can say their debut defined a scene, a time, and marked a paradigm shift in the music industry. But Clap Your Hands Say Yeah managed all this and more; no wonder the band’s self-titled first album is still considered one of the finest and most influential independent releases of the 2000s.
A heady blend of leftfield pop and melodic, exuberant indie rock, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah repurposed a number of classic musical references for a new generation of music fans. Fun-loving and quirky, the band — formed around the enigmatic singer-songwriter Alec Ounsworth — achieved that rare alchemy, synthesizing a dizzying array of styles and influences into something wholly their own.
And that something was utterly glorious, full of buzzing synths, trebly guitars, bustling drums, and Ounsworth’s lilting, wailing vocals. The record’s raw, ramshackle sound was an integral part of its appeal; time has merely magnified that charm. In “The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth” and “Upon This Tidal Wave Of Young Blood” Ounsworth wrote two of the most uplifting, celebratory tracks of this millennium, obvious highlights on an album of consistent excellence and one rightly lauded for re-writing the rules of what indie bands could be.
Self-released in the United States in June 2005, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah proved a true phenomenon, earning ecstatic praise around the world.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
W/ Babehoven
9:30 Club
Monday, March 31
Doors @ 7pm
$35
All ages
