I’m at Top Pot and the album the barista is playing Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s self-titled debut album, and I realize this has already been said by a million different people—quoth the album: “We’ve already said it before in a million differen ways which are not quite right”—but let me keep the echo going: this is a very good album. It just ended in the store and now I’m playing it again, from the top, on my iPod. I realize that to all the people who know about music this Slog post must read to you like a press release from Mars—who doesn’t already know about Clap Your Hands Say Yeah? who is this guy? what year is it?—to which I say, it’s possible to miss good things, and if you are one of the two or three Stranger readers who missed Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, or who for whatever still haven’t looked into Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, let me take the time to say, You are missing a good thing. This is brilliantly catchy.

To paraphrase Matthew Stadler, I like it because it is good.

Also, independence is good. How do you feel about fireworks? Brendan Kiley suggests:

Fireworks
(LIBERTÉ) You could cadge your way onto a friend’s roof to watch the Big Explosions, or be a lame-ass and watch them on TV, or be a triple lame-ass and ignore them altogether, but you should be mingling with your brethren, preferably in the general vicinity of Seattle’s finest intersections: Belmont and Belmont and Bellevue, Bellevue, and Bellevue. Nearby, you can find secret parks, nooks with simultaneous views of Puget Sound and Lake Union, and small bats that come out and circle at dusk. (Capitol Hill, 10 pm.)