Clap Your Hands Say Yeah frontman Alec Ounsworth will release his first solo album, Mo Beauty, via Anti- on October 20.
Recording in the Big Easy, Ounsworth tapped a team of blues and jazz vets from the city’s vast musical coffers, including Meters bassist George Porter, Jr., Galactic drummer Stanton Moore, Greyboy Allstars keyboardist Robert Walter, and Al “Carnival Time” Johnson.
“New Orleans informed the spirit of the record, as it should,” he said in a statement. “Any record can be influenced by its location aesthetically, and some are more than others. So it was with this record… it is New Orleans, after all.”
Ounsworth’s album arrives as the future of his once-hotly-tipped indie band appears a bit murky. Just today, a spokesperson who represents both Ounsworth and CYHSY told SPIN.com that CYHSY are “definitely not breaking up,” but are up to “nothing for now.”
Last winter, the band’s manager said the quintet was ditching plans for a new album and going on hiatus. A “final show” followed shortly after. But less than a month later, the fivesome debuted a brand new song on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and posted it to their website.
Mixed messages, for sure, but at least Clap Your Hands fans have Ounsworth’s new project to anticipate.
Mo Beauty tracklist:
1. “Modern Girl (…With Scissors)”
2. “Bones in the Grave”
3. “Holy, Holy, Holy Moses (Song for New Orelans”
4. “That is not my Home (After Bruegel)”
5. “Idiots in the Rain”
6. “South Philadelphia (Drug Days)”
7. “What Fun.”
8. “Me and You, Watson”
9. “Obscene Queen Bee #2”
10. “When You’ve No Eyes”
