"When we signed our souls over to the devil, he promised us this would happen," singer Alec Ounsworth said in December 2005, when the buzz about his arty Brooklyn band was turning into a roar. "This" turned out to be commercial success so modest (both their albums missed the top 20 here and in America) that they should consider asking the devil for a refund. But if Old Nick's side of the deal was simply to make them prominent in an indie context, he has done his bit. In the online world, which discovered them first, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are proper stars. It's standing room only here, and quite a few people are singing along to songs that only the committed could love.

While the band's high profile testifies to the power of MySpace and blogging, their sound points backward, to the pre-internet era. Echoes of Talking Heads and New York's 1970s "no wave" scene are discernible in the dissonance of a typical Clap song. Talking Heads minus the melodies, that is - this is not a band who put much stock in choruses. And they have the courage of their convictions: on the second number, Satan Said Dance, they are already hunkering down for a discordant 10-minute improv session. Each of the four backing members seems to be playing a slightly different song, loosely stitched together by Ounsworth's yapping, David Byrne-ish vocal. Nice work if you can get it.

Still, there are things to enjoy among the sharp angles and scratchy surfaces. Goodbye to Mother and the Cove, from the current album Some Loud Thunder, has them really letting their hair down - it incorporates megaphone, xylophone and a brass trio, who forget themselves and dance. Everyone pitches in, grabbing whatever instrument is handy, stacking sound upon sound. It's a monument to the power of cutting loose, and at this point, as the set ends, the devil really does have the best tunes.