Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

THE REVIEW

Play (the unexpected one).

The stylistic/formal convention of putting words to feelings, logically reworking the thrill of a chord, explaining something for someone, is it plausible? Should we analyze the chemical reactions that allow a tear to flow on our face? Is it useful to employ scientific analysis to categorize our relationship with a woman? Are we forced to name, place, time, and manner the incessant crawling of facts and noises that envelop us in their powerful coils?

We are afraid. We feel it, and the anxiety is strong, the Black Scythe looms, explanations are urgently needed, because, absolute truths, prophets, certainties, flimsy plastic certainties.

And so we search for reasons, specious attempts at anti-relativism in the form of universal essays, speeches in the name of values, identity, and flags. Philosophers with beards as long as their unsustainable theses, leaders with laughable convictions, ridiculous waste of throat and excesses of perspiration. Low perspectives, low points of view. Lives from the uniform ethical/moral sphere, with "consistent" thinking, with the foresight of those who have lived more than you and, in the glint of eyes swollen with more or less memorable memories, will always know more than you.

But we know something.

We have not seen the erection or demolition of the Wall, we know from hearsay how people lived during the years of lead, we know little or nothing about the fraud of '46, we are effectively BigMac-eaters on repeat, without objectives or much less ideals.
However, we are in constant search of that something extra, that salt that makes life more digestible, that pinch of madness that lights up the dirty gray of our lives fetid with detergents and stain removers.

Sometimes we find it: track 6, "The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth".

We don't know whether to cry, laugh, wriggle in a fit of convulsions, sever that network of nerves overloaded with electricity commonly defined as the brain. Love a woman, with all the passion and ardor we are allowed. Wallow in a bath of sadness and euphoria. Be reborn. Die. Hope. Die again. In a continuous alternation of dawn and sunset, of rain and sun, the atmosphere of two languid guitars and a moving singer with bright hopes can give meaning to an entire existence or to its conclusion, always with the usual doubt: cry or laugh?

I Clap Your Hands Say Yeah will be the soundtrack of my eventual wedding. Or of my suicide.