D+It isn't exactly fair to say that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!-they of obnoxious name, jangly guitars and aberrant business sense-was a victim of its own success. The quintet self-recorded its 2005 debut and released and promoted it without a record label. But its reception was something new, something that the critic Robert Cristgau noted in his essay for The Village Voice's 2006 Pazz and Jop Poll: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! was the first victim of a blogosphere able to define the next big thing, in this case, a band whose popularity was wholly a product of the Internet. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they went from cool to clich in a matter of weeks.

It was a shame, because their debut was a treat. It was far from perfect, but notched enough pluses in the right categories: art-damaged, but moderately so; informed by Talking Heads and The Feelies, but not overly indebted; and catchy in the vein of, say, a great XTC song. But after more hype than the album duly merited, the band's meter suddenly clicked zero, and no one knew whether the stakes for a follow-up had been set impossibly high or appallingly low.

Whatever the expectations were, Clap Your Hands didn't live up to them on Some Loud Thunder, which was produced by David Friddman, who is best known for his work with The Flaming Lips. The presence of a warm body behind the knobs isn't discernible on the title track, which opens the disc and sounds more compressed than the most elemental of Guided by Voices albums. That band's songs had warmth; "Some Loud Thunder" is just painful, but was it not for its distortion, it might rank with the band's best.

At first listen, the rest of the disc sounds fairly by-the-numbers, but there's an element missing here, as though the band smoothed out its arrangements but unraveled its song structures. Some of them meander, others build tension but neglect to pay off, and almost the whole disc seems aimless.

An exception to this rule and the worst offender here is "Satan Said Dance," which, despite its squeaks and shreds, is wound tightly around a disco beat. Its chorus repeats ceaselessly the words in its title, and singer Alec Ounsworth's lyrics increase in banality with each verse: "My head turns white but my face is green / But my feet are still goin' if you know what I mean" isn't even the worse line.

One saving grace is "Underwater (You & Me)," which benefits greatly from Friddman's talent for dense production: For once, the guitar noodles and whizzes don't feel like addenda to cookie-cutter indie rock. But one moment out of 11 that doesn't sound hurried or incomplete or misconceived is no consolation prize. It's what Some Loud Thunder should have been.