Live Review: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Loose Tooth @ The Night Cat, Melbourne

As befits a band that first connected through the defunct social networking site Friendster, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have always carried an oddly dated sense of cool. Even their name, long since truncated to CYHSY by early-2000s blog culture, feels like a hyperlink to an era of MySpace profiles, mp3 rips, and ironic displays of self-belief.

Two decades later, the crowd filing into The Night Cat seems eager to revisit that era as the Philadelphia band performs their 2005 debut in full. That frontman, Alec Ounsworth, has cycled through innumerable bandmates and released five more albums under the CYHSY name, hardly matters tonight.

The show was originally booked for the larger Northcote Theatre but quietly shifted to this smaller, circular venue. Whatever the reason, it’s a happy downgrade. The Night Cat’s in-the-round stage and intimate acoustics suit a band whose breakthrough record sounded like it was recorded during a sharehouse party. Instead of a cavernous half-full theatre, we get a packed club.

Before the nostalgia begins, local trio Loose Tooth open with a set of smart, hook-driven indie rock. They start with Buy Into Something and Suffering – the first two songs from their new album, New Age – songs built on big, buzzing Rickenbacker chords and crunching melodic basslines.

Between numbers, singer Nellie Jackson deadpans: “We’ve got three more songs – it’s a half-hour set. Perfect. Nobody wants to hear more than that from a support band.” It’s the kind of wry confidence that made Melbourne’s indie scene so exciting in the mid-2010s. When Jackson and Etta Curry’s voices combine, it's hard to think of a better band in town. They slip in their 2015 single Will You, still blistering and bright, before closing with Do You Wanna Fall, another highlight from New Age. They’re an excellent choice of support.

As Tyler Jenke wrote in his interview with CYHSY's Alec Ounsworth, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is “a record which feels accomplished yet accessible. It's an album that sounds like dedicated music fans were involved in the creation, and it feels as though your close, music-playing friends could have made it.” As the four band members thread their way through the crowd and up the steps to the stage, it feels as though anyone in the audience could tag on the end of them and receive the gentle roar of recognition.

Ounsworth grins and adjusts his cap, a century-old train-driver kind of accessory that matches his slightly bewildered air. On the podcast The Life of the Record, Ounsworth joked that he didn’t mind if people couldn’t make out his lyrics: “I get it, I have a freaky voice, but I’m hitting the notes.” The affection in the room tonight suggests that everyone not only gets it but a lot of us can sing every warbling syllable back to him.

The band opens with Some Loud Thunder, the title track from their second album, and an atmospheric synth-heavy detour that's driven, as many of tonight's songs are, by the shifting slabs of sound from bassist Todd Erk. Then comes the real business: the self-titled debut, track by track, starting with a de-sea shantyed Clap Your Hands!.

Ounsworth’s mustard-yellow guitar matches the album cover; a few fans wear matching T-shirts. As Let the Cool Goods Speak and Details of the War roll past, that peculiar mix of nervousness and joy returns to his face. “It’s weird being looked at from all sides,” he says, glancing at the 360-degree crowd before later pacing the edges of the stage. “A bizarre environment.”

At the record’s midpoint, The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth still feels like the album’s thesis statement: five and a half minutes, no chorus, and a slow-burn melody that seems to rise and rise. “Our big hit single,” Ounsworth laughs. “Here's another, uhhh...hit single” He follows it with the almost as luminous Is This Love?. His voice is deeper and less nasal than it was in 2005; not smoother exactly, but more deliberate, as if he’s grown into its affect.

Mid-set, Ounsworth muses on the comforts of being back in Australia. “At least you guys are in a functional country,” he says. “It’s like a tropical Portland, graffiti and stuff, but with palm trees.” The crowd cheers. "It's going to be hard to say goodbye," he says quietly before the metronomic stomp of Gimme Some Salt takes over. He admits that the album still contains “weird childish errors,” but half-jokingly calls it “a perfect album” before closing the sequence with Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood. The sing-along is thunderous, the kind of joyous communal release that is almost impossible to produce unless you're happy to embrace nostalgia.

For the encore, Ounsworth returns alone to cover Johnny Thunders’ You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory, a fittingly fragile choice for a songwriter so often accused of hiding behind irony. Then the full band re-emerges and the tone shifts. Ketamine and Ecstasy become a tightly wound ode to collegiate anxiety, and Chance for a Cure unspools into a jam that shows how powerful the current lineup can be when it's given the chance to stretch out.

Between songs, Ounsworth reflects on Lou Reed’s habit of being able to be so objective about his own work that he could grade it. “I think that was kind of a B-plus,” Ounsworth says after the little-known Better Off, half-smiling at this display of confidence. “Maybe this whole gig is a B-plus show.” The self-effacing humour disarms the room. Then comes Satan Said Dance, which detonates in all its twitchy glory, sharp edges and restless energy. Where They Perform Miracles follows, propelled by Jonas Oesterle’s tumbling, almost Jaki Liebezeit-like drumming.

Eighteen years ago, I reviewed this same band for this same publication. At that show, behind the stage curtain, a large red LED clock sat on a table and dictated the evening. The band started and ended exactly one hour later to the second. I described Ounsworth as “a punked-up Rodriguez,” nervy and withdrawn, pacing like a man unsure whether to flee or play another song. Tonight, he’s much more relaxed, more generous with his bandmates and his audience. Near the end of tonight's set, he grins, nods at the others, and adds an unplanned song, Same Mistake.

Like so many bands of their era, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah sound almost too good now – technically sharper, emotionally clearer, and the nervous energy essential and expected and no longer the product of nerves. Yet what lingers is the same feeling that defined that debut: a belief that ordinary people, with a work ethic driven by anxiety and self-belief, could make something that sounded so specifically of its place and time. Tonight, that's a pretty nice place to be.