Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is sold on the do-it-yourself approach

AUSTIN, Texas -- Tyler Sargent knew something had to give when he became tight with the UPS guy. At first they only saw each other once in a while. Then it became a weekly thing. Before long the bass player and the delivery man were greeting each other like old friends and Sargent's Brooklyn apartment began filling up with boxes. The boxes were stacked to the ceiling in the front hall and jammed into corners in the bedroom. They doubled as furniture in the living room. His bandmates had to help him haul them up the stairs.

''One day the UPS guy finally asked me, 'What is going on here?' and I realized I had no idea," Sargent recalls. ''There were invoices everywhere. We were losing money sending CDs to Australia. Even with Alec's mom helping we couldn't keep up."

The chaos in Sargent's de facto distribution center turned out to be the making of a rock 'n' roll fairy tale. Sargent plays in a group called Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Last June the band started selling a CD through its website, and people started buying it. Lots of people. To date Clap Your Hands Say Yeah has sold an astonishing 200,000 copies of its eponymous album, which was self-recorded (for $8,000), self-promoted (with help from a few influential bloggers), and self-distributed (right down to the stamp-licking). The band fills 1,000-plus-seat venues around the world. And they've done it without a record company.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which plays at Avalon on Wednesday, is the hottest unsigned band in the country, and according to the members, that's the way it's going to stay. The group has recently had to install a small support team: Daily excursions to the post office (in whatever city they happened to be playing that night) just to keep up with orders persuaded CYHSY to enlist the services of a CD distributor. They've also hired a publicist and booking agent. As of a few weeks ago, when the band members gathered in a nightclub dressing room to chat about their experiences as grass-roots phenoms, CYHSY had entered into some sort of nebulous arrangement with Wichita Recordings, a UK indie label.

SAMPLE CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH Check out audio clips at www.boston.com/ae/music

''Well, we haven't physically signed a contract," says lead singer and songwriter Alec Ounsworth, a quiet man in paint-splattered sneakers and a fedora who would rather be talking about the music than the story of the music. ''Apparently we have a handshake agreement, which is to say we've been touring on their dime. So far. Again, everything is happening so fast and we've been on tour for such a long time, and anyway -- The idea is that Wichita will handle distribution over there."

If the five guys in Clap Your Hands Say Yeah seem shell-shocked, somewhat fatigued, and perhaps a bit unclear as to their band's precise status, it's because the whole thing has unfolded in the most remarkable -- and, some say, irreproducible -- fashion. That's not to say they're doing anything spectacularly new; self-promotion is the grist of any indie-rock career, especially these days. The quintet, bred in the Boston area and based in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, is part of a growing wave of bands to market their music with the aid of such modern, grass-roots tools as MP3 files, blogs, and online music stores. But the confluence of circumstances that combined in 2005 generated a level of buzz that set a new standard for the do-it-yourself music culture and catapulted CYHSY from obscurity to cult stardom in a matter of months.

And now a word about the music, because in these heady days of hype it's easy to forget those crazy little things called songs. CYHSY's album opens with a wacky track called ''Clap Your Hands!," which introduces Ounsworth as a deranged-sounding carnival barker hollering over woozy calliope. Fortuitously, the rest of the disc moves into more relatable, but no less charming and enigmatic, territory that incorporates a dizzying mash of influences, from Talking Heads and Arcade Fire to Yo La Tengo and Neutral Milk Hotel. It's joyful and colorful and easy to fall in love with, which is what happened early last year when the young band booked a three-week residency during the month of January at the New York club Pianos.

Jasper Coolidge, who books Pianos, started writing about CYHSY on his blog, Jenyk.com. Brooklyn Vegan, another key indie-music blogger who posts at BrooklynVegan.com, picked up on the band and introduced them to her readers, and so did Patrick McNamara (www.ohmyrockness.com), who's also director of the online music store Insound, which would shortly begin selling the band's CD. From there the blog-based frenzy spread to social networking communities, and word was out.

''It was the perfect storm," says Dave Godowsky, the 26-year-old director of A&R at Cambridge-based Rounder Records. Godowsky was CYHSY's unofficial manager between November of 2004 and last summer, as well as a roommate of the band's drummer, Sean Greenhalgh, who grew up in Marshfield. (CYHSY's Boston roots are deep: Tyler Sargent and his twin brother Lee, the group's guitarist and keyboardist, are from Hingham, and multi-instrumentalist Robbie Guertin was raised in Belmont. Ounsworth -- who met the others through his Somerville-based sister -- lives in Philadelphia.)

''All these things came together through the online stuff," says Godowsky. ''The venue with Jasper, the retail with Insound, and promotion with Brooklyn Vegan and the other blogs. Every part of the picture happened in this organic way, and in that sense it was a real anomaly. Then the Pitchfork piece came out in June [the influential online 'zine published a rave review of the album] and that just speeded things up. In September, if you walked into Virgin Records in Union Square, the first thing you saw was White Stripes, Coldplay, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Labels pay thousands of dollars for that placement. The Clap Your Hands Say Yeah CD didn't even have a bar code."

Mark Bowen first heard about the band last April from a young woman who sells CYHSY T-shirts. Bowen is cofounder of Wichita Recordings, a six-year-old London-based label that's home to Bloc Party and the Cribs and has released albums by Bright Eyes, My Morning Jacket, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. He immediately began courting CYHSY, while watching with growing consternation as every other label on the planet wooed the band as well.

''I don't claim to have any great vision. I just like to work with people who do," says Bowen, whose label will be distributing CYHSY records in Europe. ''Why do they need us? Because we know about putting records out in France and they don't."

The band's reasons for picking Wichita run the gamut from ''they're extremely nice" to ''the office strikingly resembles Tyler's apartment" to ''Mark looks like Paul Bunyan." But in all seriousness, says Ounsworth, ''working with a small label like that just feels better. When the guy coming to your shows is the same guy that runs the company . . . it just feels like there's a bit more control. The idea of absolute control for the band is primary. It always will be."

CYHSY is wrapping up its tour this spring with a pair of dates at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, although a few college dates, several festivals in Europe and Japan, and appearances at Coachella and Bonnaroo are also on the schedule. The group hopes to record its second album later this year, possibly during the summer, but the timing, like so many things, is unclear. One thing's for certain, though, says Ounsworth. Neither the demands of the marketplace nor the lure of fame will distract them from the thing they set out to do in the first place.

''We made an album that we could be proud of while we were working day jobs and on our own dime," he says. ''We like what we do. This is nice, it's flattering, but we have the luxury of looking back and understanding that we never really asked for it in the first place."

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah performs on Wednesday at Avalon with the Brunettes. Tickets are $14.25. Doors are at 7, show at 8. Call 617-931-2000 or visit www.ticketmaster.com.

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.