Ah the modern day troubadour, surely one of rock’s least attractive jobs.
Whatever you face, you do so alone, a state of isolation experienced whilst the audience sits there at a show wondering if the tortured soul that’s getting bared is yours. You may smile when you’re low, but for many singer-songwriters the more honest and fragile you may be, the fewer volunteers there are to pick up the pieces afterwards.
It can help to employ a nom-de-guerre, of course, instead of your own; last year Jack Tatum, aka Wild Nothing, produced one of its best albums in Life Of Pause, a self sufficient effort in composition terms but one which Tatum had never considered as a solo record.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah emerged in 2005 as very much a collective proposition, but in recent years it’s been Philadelphian Alec Ounsworth as the driving force, The Tourist’s accompanying press making no mention of either co-writers, co-performers or co-anyone else. Its kernel, in fact, lives in what Ounsworth has described as ‘a purge of certain emotional confusion that manifested itself in the last several years…not an easy album to make, by virtue of the fact that it was an emotional time for me’.
Unbottling demons can make for work perfect to empathise with, but also a pitch that suffers from compression and self pity; The Tourist however is a work of assured confidence, one man’s vision, not a take stymied by narrow perspective.
It’s also one that takes the familiar vagaries of trans-Atlantic indie rock and fixes them with a hardened gaze. Opener The Pilot beats nervously around an acoustic strum and downplayed keys, Ounsworth’s slightly atonal words snatching at the uncertainty of words and deeds, the ‘tough motherf***er’ he refers to seemingly an aside, a jibe of self deprecation. If that’s asking for some kind of acknowledgement, the avant-pop of Down (Is Where I Want To Be) splices Arcade Fire’s zest with the histrionics of Muse – gambits which shouldn’t tessellate but somehow do – whilst the rangy, drip-white funk of Fireproof is perfectly skeletal, leaving nothing to chance.
This sparsity is probably just a reflection of Ounsworth’s search for fulfilment, to ‘have to try to do something each time that’s new and engaging for me’, past – and arguably more commercial – territories being just those. On Unfolding Above A Celibate Moon (Los Angeles Nursery Rhyme) he’s clutching at notes like motes of dust, a bleary harmonica part way through and ham-fisted, plaintive guitar solo emphasising the downward arc of being so strung out on feeling-junkets that the safe harbour of people never seems like enough consolation.
As much as the singer appears to be trying to cajole and confound in equal measure, there are still threads on which he writes an invitation to the top table of American alternatives: The Tourist’s best moment Better Off is one on which the bass rumbles in satisfyingly and the horizons are brought nearer by looking at the sky, the one anthemical chapter served up here, as if to remind the listener of spells cast by him which will never be consciously re-imagined.
Created alone, that The Tourist has not one hint of voyeurism in its coda is a triumph. Alex Ounsworth has jettisoned his baggage in a way that precludes no-one, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah remain a proposition that gives him a facade always worth taking at more than face value.
