We Love Handclaps: "Avalanche Aminos" by Guided By Voices

Detail of the cover illustration of If: Worlds of Science Fiction magazine, September 1954

I always find it odd when a group with a large body of work in the pop/rock milieu doesn't have at least a couple songs with prominent handclaps - it's almost like they're making a point of not using them. Guided By Voices has one very well-known "handclap song" - "My Valuable Hunting Knife" from Alien Lanes - but I wanted to come up with a second GBV song to post here to show that they weren't handclap snobs. It took me a while to think of "Avalanche Aminos" - a product of the Ric Ocasek sessions that produced the Do the Collapse album, the song didn't get released until the odds-and-ends Hold on Hope EP came out in 2000. Based on the songwriting credits, I'd guess that it's a Doug Gillard composition that Bob Pollard wrote lyrics for.

"Avalanche Aminos" starts with a great slide-guitar riff on one and then two guitars, but then it proceeds to pummel that riff into the ground through repetition. The key is that, right when the repeating riff is really starting to verge on "annoying", you get a great handclapping break at the end of the verse. The riff doesn't even change (it stays the same for most of the song), but that little handclap break switches things up enough to make it interesting (together with a pretty compelling melody from Pollard), and the song wraps up in just over two minutes to avoid the need for a third hook.

"Avalanche Aminos" by Guided By Voices