8.12.2009 | 2:09 pm

First Look: Flashy Python (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah) – “Skin & Bones”

Alec Ounsworth
Photo by Lalla_Ali

If it’s not obvious enough on their records, Alec Ounsworth, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s frontman, is a pretty willful young dude. Willful enough to release two albums, Ryan Adams-style, this year, one under his own name — the upcoming Mo Beauty — and Skin & Bones, his debut disc as Flashy Python. Ironically, the album (out now and streaming below, surprise!) ignores the band name in favor of murky, serious-sounding indie mired in Elephant Six-y sludge. Not as crisp and tuneful as Clap Your Hand’s debut but certainly an improvement on the (probably) intentionally unlikable Some Loud Thunder, Flashy Python won’t surprise any of Alec’s fans, but it’ll get its coils around you just the same. The title track is the album’s best moment, a freewheelin’ guitar carnival that lets him gets his Tortured Artist ya-yas out while also providing necessary jam-fodder. Stream it all after the jump. [Via P4k]

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  • Hawla

    “Some Loud Thunder” being intentionally bad is a load of rubbish. It’s probably the most unfairly maligned album of the decade, and I find it heaps more enjoyable than CYHSY’s debut–one of the decade’s best. Critics were expecting one thing and got another, trashed it, and subsequently no one gave it a chance. Too bad. In the grand tradition of sophomore efforts by Galaxie 500 and Weezer, it’s better than the original, even if it takes a few spins to hear the genius.

    That said, this Flashy Python album is quite good, too. Not as good as “Some Loud Thunder”, but certainly in the same vein and a solid, if subtle, step forward.

  • David Greenwald

    It has some moments (“Emily Jean Stock”) but its fundamental problem (as with this record) is that the band happened to be really good at writing post-Strokes pop and decided to stop playing to their strengths in favor of “more challenging” (read: masturbatory) experimentation once they got more popular than they probably expected to. It’s hard not to see it as a rebel move given their history, but regardless, the songs just aren’t there in the same way they were on the first record.

  • David Greenwald

    Also “unlikable” and “bad” are two different things. I think the band went avant-garde in response to their popularity and wanted to get small again. If that was their intent, they succeeded.

  • Hawla

    Well, I don’t find it to be intentionally unlikable either. I find it to be tremendously likable. Every song through “Satan Said Dance” has a hook, “Yankee Go Home” is a potential single, and the last two songs are barn-burners as well. The only song I find less-than-stellar on it is “The Mother and the Cove” which is a bit annoying.

    Maybe it doesn’t grab you as immediately as the first, but that doesn’t mean much. Same thing goes for lots of great records in relation to their predecessors: “The Slider”, “Tim”, “Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer”, “The Great Escape”, “Abbey Road”–to name a few. All are arguably better than their predecessors, as long as the listener can adjust to a band that’s unwilling to stand still.

    Sorry if this comes off as argumentative. In this day and age with so much music coming so fast that it’s easy to write something off if it doesn’t live up to expectations after a cursory listen. And I think that’s what happened to “Some Loud Thunder”, unfortunately. The days of “living” with a record are past us–if it hasn’t grabbed you in 2 or 3 listens, you most likely will never listen to it again.

  • Dave Rawkblog

    No, I get you — I feel like that about plenty of albums. Just not this one. They went a different direction and to me, it wasn’t the right one.