A few months ago, New York band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were making and posting their own CDs. Now they're one of the most heavily tipped bands around. They tell Brian Boyd how they did it.
THE microeconomics of five-piece Brooklyn band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah used to be thus: without a record company, distributor, publicist, radio plugger or booking agent, they resorted to ye olde DIY route of selling their debut album. If, like many people, you had heard of the band through internet blogs, you went to their website and ordered a copy. Back in the band's apartment, supply wasn't keeping up with demand. A blank CD costs about $1 (85c) and they could only be ordered in units of 5,000. They had to wait for more and more album sales before they could order more compact discs to make more albums to sell to more people so they could buy more compact discs to sell to more people.
It was a cottage industry initiative that saw the band selling 40,000 copies of their album before they even registered on the music industry's radar. A few months on and now they're beating away record companies, distributors, publicists, radio pluggers and booking agents with a big stick. Depending on what publication you chose to subscribe to, CYHSY are either "this year's Arcade Fire" or "the US's answer to The Arctic Monkeys". Or both. They're fronted by the laconic and slightly esoteric, Alec Ounsworth, whose distinctive vocal sound seems to attract or repel in equal measures. It's so adenoidal that it has already been described as sounding like an "indie Adam Sandler".
The band sound a bit like Talking Heads on ketamine with faint echoes of mid-period Bowie and a slightly pissed-off goth rock undertow. They are being hailed as the vanguard of the new indie revolution wherein clued-in weblogs shout the odds and call the score.
"We sort of came up through the Post Office route," drawls the phlegmatic Ounsworth. "The very first thing we did was to self-fund and self-produce a seven-track mini-album just to give to promoters so we could wangle some gigs. We eventually got the shows and built up a bit of a live reputation but because there was no label or anything, we just tacked a few more songs on to the mini-album to make it a full-length affair. We were delivering this to record stores ourselves, but again, because no one knew us, or was representing us, it was a struggle. On the website, though, we were selling about five copies a day - steadily. But that just grew and grew and it got to the point where it was almost a full-time job having to package them individually".
There was a crucial intervention by the all-powerful Pitchfork Media website (see Revolver page 8), a specialist indie music site which has a "makes 'em or breaks 'em" status. Pitchfork have an album rating that goes from zero to 10. The CYHSY album got a truly exceptional 9.0 rating, with the website saying of them: "Great artists redefine the limits of their chosen art forms."
The Pitchfork review went up in mid-June. The very next day the band were inundated with orders for the album. "People say 'were you surprised how fast it all took off?' And the only answer to that is how could I not be surprised," says Ounsworth. "The album was recorded for somewhere in between $5,000 and $10,000 (€4,225 and €8,450) at a discounted rate in a studio. There's a lot of focus now on this new independent route that we took but to be honest it was not an ideologically-driven decision to do it that way. Sure, we're all about maintaining freedom in our dealings with the industry and in that sense it is important, but it was more a case of where we found ourselves at that time. In the absence of any label doing it, we found we could get it out there. People talk about the majors and even the indies being a necessary evil but, again, it was more that we could sustain a certain situation by selling it from our apartment and posting it out ourselves.
"You do hear a lot of what I would call junior high school rumours about how evil the industry is and all of that. That is not my experience so far. But I do try to keep myself clear from all that label talk. We do want to keep this project as it is."
The band now go through the Wichita label outside their home territory and have a distribution deal in place in the US.
As some indication of how far they've already travelled, the backlash has already begun. "It's fine with us because at least it shows we're getting some sort of reaction" says Ounsworth. "I don't know why this should be but apparently some people have real difficulties with how I sing [and to be fair, he can sound like a yodeller going through puberty at times]. But I've always sung that way - it's not a style I have cultivated or anything. It's a lot more controlled now than it used to be. Some people say I sound like a a jazz saxophone, whatever that is supposed to mean."
As for the music, Ounsworth says that all five of them come from differing musical backgrounds. "There's more than one person in there with a background in jazz music," he says. "As for influences, I listen to everything from The Pointer Sisters to Rachmaninov. But if pushed I really admire Willie Nelson, Nick Cave, Smokey Robinson, Otis Redding and Stevie Wonder."
A tour of the UK late last year saw them coming face to face with their reputation as a "buzz band" - almost every show had to be moved to a bigger venue and they were subject to the sort of scrutiny they never had in the US. "It was really bizarre," he says. "I felt like I should have been doing some juggling or something on stage just to put on a show for all the people that turned out. I'm kind of worried about unrealistic expectations now. What I did find very strange was how everyone was talking about this new hyped band. We don't have a label to create the hype. The only hype came from the music press."
There will not be some two-year world tour on the back of the debut for CYHSY. Ounsworth says they started out differently and intend to continue in that vein. "We already have another two or three albums ready to go. The next set of songs fit the band perfectly, but I'm not so sure what happens after that. For the moment, though, we're still trying to get used to this strange new place we find ourselves in. I'm still someone who feels bad if I can't post an album out to someone who has ordered it from us on the same day as we get the order. Thankfully, we have people helping us with the posting now."
A certain Coco Schwab was on the guest list for a CYHSY show a few months ago - it's the name David Bowie uses to get to gigs without people making a big deal of his presence. He is, by all accounts, a huge fan. ""Yeah, it was nice he came along," says Ounsworth. "I didn't get to meet him as I was a little late off stage because we were unloading. I think he split right as we finished. I have a lot of respect for the guy but some people just get carried away by the fact that Bowie turned up. I'm not really down with that entertainment hero-worship."
The Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album is released on January 20. The band play Dublin's Crawdaddy on February 4
