Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - The Tourist (2017) [FLAC]

  Genre: Rock
  Style: Indie
  Source: CD (log + cue)
  Bit rate: ~ 900 kbps
  Bit depth: 16
  Sample rate: 44.1 kHz

  01 The Pilot 
  02 A Chance to Cure 
  03 Down (Is Where I Want to Be) 
  04 Unfolding Above Celibate Moon (Los Angeles Nursery Rhyme) 
  05 Better Off
  06 Fireproof 
  07 The Vanity of Trying
  08 Loose Ends
  09 Ambulance Chaser
  10 Visiting Hours 

  For all intents and purposes, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah has always been the vision of lead singer/songwriter Alec Ounsworth. However, with the departure of original drummer Sean Greenhalgh after 2014's Only Run, CYHSY technically became the sole creative property of Ounsworth. It is his voice, both literally and creatively, that permeates all of the band's fifth studio album, 2017's The Tourist. Recorded, written, and performed by Ounsworth alone, the album gains some semblance of collaborative continuity via the presence of Mercury Rev's Dave Fridmann, who mixed the album and who previously worked on Only Run and the group's 2007 effort, Some Loud Thunder. Primarily, you get the sense that CYHSY's sanguine, intricately crafted sound has finally been boiled down to Ounsworth's own singularly poetic, nasal-pitched aesthetic.

  However, that doesn't mean that the band's sound has undergone any major transformation. As on past CYHSY albums, cuts like "Down (Is Where I Want to Be)," "Better Off," and "The Vanity of Trying" still bring to mind a combination of Elliott Smith's ruminative folk, Echo & the Bunnymen's moody '80s rock, and a bit of Taking Tiger Mountain-era Brian Eno. There's a tactile, organic quality to many of the tracks here, such as on "Unfolding Above Celibate Moon (Los Angeles Nursery Rhyme)," in which Ounsworth, doing his best Bob Dylanesque coo, sings of the travails of Hollywood life, his voice set against a buoyant analog-sounding keyboard riff that has the cadence of an astronaut skipping weightless across the surface of the Moon. Emphatically, the song ends with a yearning burst of harmonica and fuzz-soaked guitar squelch, as if Ounsworth were some kind of one-man psych-rock band