Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Some Loud Thunder

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are a pathologically contrary concern. Archetypal art-rockers to a man, you suspect this New York/ Philadelphia band's entire raison d'être lies in subverting the expected: they diligently booby-trap their jittery indie rock with just enough attitudinal tremors to ensure they remain firmly in the margins.

Their eponymous 2005 debut was greeted with loud critical hosannas, and the pressures of shaping an equally resourceful follow-up can be heard on this nervy, brittle record. Just as their first offering began with a bawdy fairground barker, so Some Loud Thunder opens with a title track that is deliberately distorted into a grisly lo-fi crackle. The message appears to be that we take them on their terms, or not at all.

Thankfully, they don't sabotage everything so wantonly. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are best when they negotiate an uneasy marriage of the cerebral and the visceral, and the keening "Emily Jean Stock" is uncommonly lovely, a Yo La Tengo-esque adventure that contrives to be both staccato and luscious. "Satan Said Dance" is an enjoyable romp, Devo in the disco, while the fractured "Goodbye to Mother and the Cove" is almost as sharp-edged as its title.

Older ears will detect a musical debt to both Wire and Pere Ubu, while Alec Ounsworth's vocal can't help but recall David Byrne's paranoid warble. The scat-yodelling "Yankee Go Home" would have fitted snugly on Talking Heads'More Songs about Buildings and Food, while the spectral "Mama, Won't You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning" carries a distant echo of Byrne/Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Which, frankly, can never be a bad thing.

Ounsworth's loose lyrics are scattergun half-thoughts heard through a glass, starkly, and ultimately the busy Some Loud Thunder is too cluttered and reserved to be a fully satisfying listening experience. There is a fantastic album waiting to be made by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: let us hope that next time, they let it breathe.