ANNUALS - Be He Me Review

The debut album by this Raleigh, North Carolina collective sprawls with confidence, combining sunny layers of strings, classical piano, stomp-rock riffs, entrancing space noises, and triumphant shouts. Twenty-year-old frontman Adam Baker writes melodically intricate and ecstatically dissonant songs that recall Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene, but Annuals have their own utterly exotic aura. JULIA SIMON...full text I must be old. Adam Baker, the leader and head of Annuals, says that “Dry Clothes,” a joyous fever-smoke hum-along snuggled just inside of Annuals’ debut Be He Me, is about his fear of the dog in The Sandlot. The fucking Sandlot. I mean, I vaguely remember a fat child with really red hair and freckles like Saturn, and a fence, maybe that great American emblem of childhood fear—The Geriatric Neighbor in the broken house. Sure, I seem to recall the commercials, but I’ve never met anybody who’s seen it, let alone had their childhood tuned to the fright of its recreational torment....full text Adam Baker is the architect of this attempt at the recorded equivalent of a building by Gaudi-- and the North Carolinian's not but 20 years old. Wow. In concert, his five-piece backing band swap instruments and hustle after his compositions like stormchasers, putting various tourmates (except for the equally vital Evangelicals) at risk of being outed as indie rock plain bagels. Refreshingly unconcerned with perpetuating cool, Annuals' attack is fundamentally escapist: Baker seems to prefer living inside his ever-aburst music, and listeners will be lured by the world it creates, a place of freakishly sustainable energy fluctuations where surprises would be routine, naps would raise heart rates, and sighs would result from exhilaration rather than exhaustion....full text