Track Listing

1. Some Loud Thunder
2. Emily Jean Stock
3. Mama Won't You Keep Them Castles In The Air And Burning
4. Love Song No 7
5. Satan Said Dance
6. Upon Encountering The Crippled Elephant
7. Goodbye To Mother And The Cove
8. Arm And Hammer
9. Yankee Go Home
10. Underwater (You And Me)
11. Five Easy Pieces

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23261 in Music
• Released on: 2007-01-29
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .21 pounds

Amazon.co.uk Review
The first time you listen to Some Loud Thunder, the second album from Brooklyn's Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, is a pretty weird experience. Oh, sure, many of the band's key hallmarks – hallmarks that made their self-titled debut a name to drop for everyone from David Bowie to influential indie webzine Pitchfork are present and correct: shambolic guitar jangle, drums that patter around like confused puppies, and the undulating outsider yelp of vocalist Alex Ounsworth. But this is a very different record to its predecessor, one that forsakes much of the band's deranged sing-along charm in favour of offbeat experimentation and peculiar production techniques. It's hard to shake the impression that the presence of Flaming Lips producer Dave Friedmann is sometimes a destabilising influence: "Emily Jean Stock" could, you feel, be neatly orchestrated '60s Technicolor beat-pop, but its distorted drums and thin production leave it feeling drab and grey. Persist, though, and there are some great songs here: the pulsing freak-disco of "Satan Said Dance", or "Yankee Go Home" – an apparent anthem to anti-Americanism that rises in awkward, yet oddly elegaic crescendos. --Louis Pattison

Customer Reviews

Experimental yes, but great tunes
I guess that a follow up to the eponymously titled debut was always going to be difficult. What do you do? More of the same and get slated for being unadventurous or experiment and get slated for not putting out the same material. Whatever they did Clap Your Hands were going to get a serious mauling form some critics and reading around on the internet that's sure what they've got - a serious mauling from SOME critics.

Is it deserved? Absolutely not in my opinion! I can see why some will not like this. Frankly if you didn't get beyond the first track you'd really, really struggle to like this. And the first track's why this album isn't worth five stars because the rest of it is! More of this in a minute. However what we have here is an excellent collection of songs that DOES bear comparison in quality to their debut. There are some excellent tracks here ("Love Song No. 7", "Mama Won't You Keep The Castles In The Air And Burning", "Satan Said Dance", "Goodbye To Mother And The Cove" and "Underwater" stand out for me). They ARE still quirky even though there is a lot more production and effort been ploughed into this and it HAS inevitably lost some of the Lo-Fi brilliance of it's predecessor.

Okay then, Track 1. Well frankly the less said about this the better! I found this a real turn off (literally as I found it painful to listen to!). They have taken what seems like a decent song (when you listen hard enough - which I suggest if you want to keep you hearing intact that you don't) and deliberately distorted it. It really is difficult to listen to without earmuffs on, full of static and a weird metallic lustre that becomes painful after a few seconds. When I turned the CD on for the first play I was very, very disappointed. It took until about track 5 on the first listen to get over it as I was constantly listening for more static as I thought my CD must be duff. But it was deliberate! How daft! What they ought to realise is that by putting something so horrible upfront they are BOUND to aggravate critics! Maybe they'll learn next time.

That's out of the way then - phew! As for the rest of the album, personally i love it. Experimental yes, but great tunes and a pounding rhythm on most songs which most bands can't accomplish without becoming overly loud. I can see that hiring their producer was a mistake and they should banish him back to the hopelessly overrated Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev whence he came. You can hear his influence in lots of little background add-ons such as bells etc. Some of these work but quite often they don't add anything meaningful to the otherwise excellent music.

Overall, this is a very good follow up and a damned sight better than I'd hoped for. Don't listen to the critics that slate this. Listen for yourself. It took me three listens to start really enjoying this and the more I've listened the more I like! A good buy for the discerning ear!

Give it a try
In the old days we, the listeners, didn't want the same album with the same songs on it, churned out release after release. A band was allowed, and expected, to grow.
It seems like the opposite has now happened.
Some Loud Thunder has been panned and derided as "too experimental" by the esteemed music press. I have never read anything as idiotic and unimaginative as most of the reviews.
Yes, it's very different to the debut and, yes, it doesn't make me want to dance around the kitchen as the previous album did. However, it does make me want to really listen to it.
As another reviewer on here has stated, it still has the same CYHSY elements on it - the brilliant vocals, the great songs and unintelligable lyrics, and I really think that once the shock has faded, people will love it as much as the first album.
Stand out tracks for me are Mama won't help you..., Goodbye to the mother and obviously Satan said dance, which has the kitchen dancing elements to it.
A much more developed album - give it a try...

Top class 2nd album.
Don't normally write reviews but feel I need to re-balance some of the poor reviews posted and echo Sameer's comments earlier. Reading them I can't quite believe some of the reviewers have listened to the album but guess everyone has different taste.

I really liked the first album so was excited about getting this. At first I wasn't sure about this album, but not anymore - just give it a chance. Sure there are a few poor tracks on the album as with most albums(tracks 4, 6, 8) but there are also plenty of gems hiding here (esp tracks 1, 3, 7, 9, 11). If you're still not sure, try track 9 (Yankee Go Home) which is immediately likeable and one of the standouts before giving up on this.

In a year of 2nd albums feel this one is 10x better than the disappointing Arcade Fire, Bloc Party and Arctic Monkeys albums.. I rated this 5 stars to balance out the other reviews (1 star?) but honestly this is probably a 4 star effort overall.