Annuals - Be He Me
Annuals’ Debut Was Simply Last Year’s Best
3/16/07
The band Annuals is a curious musical creature. The six piece North Carolina band is led by 19 year old Adam Baker and none of the members are over 22 years old. After listening to their debut album Be He Me, the majority of us will reflect on what exactly we’ve done with our lives up until now. I’m guessing releasing a highly acclaimed album and having toured in every state but Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island didn’t make your list.After being truly amazed by their live show at Randy Bacon’s South by Southwest Showcase last weekend, I decided to dig up this album again. Considering Be He Me was my #1 album on last year’s top 50 list at my blog, this may seem a little biased, but after seeing them live finally, and the fact that it has yet to get old even after five months, deciding which album to review this week was a no brainer.With Be He Me, comparisons to Animal Collective and Broken Social Scene are almost inevitable. The former can be heard in the strange, atmospheric controlled chaos Baker and his band mates conjure up in the studio, while the latter is heard in the disjointed melodies that feel like scraps of songs they couldn’t quite finish, so they just blended them together and saw what resulted. When all is said and done, Annuals still sound unlike anything you’ve heard before.
The album gets straight to the point with the beautifully haunting opening track “Brother”, which starts with the sound of crickets, acoustic guitar, and mellow strings, only to build into a sudden crescendo of melodic static until Baker’s shout of “Go!” finds the band exploding onto the scene in what could easily be my favorite musical moment of the past year.
All seriousness soon disappears as “Dry Clothes” chirps into the scene with its fluttering electronic background and joyful guitar riffs. I read an interview with Baker where he said he wrote this song about the movie The Sandlot. While that is cool enough for points in my book, I can’t help but scratch my head at lyrics like “There’s a knapsack rally for the stranger who told of a spider and a purple toad” and “Should you talk of your son on the run/Your tongue will be ripped out by ducklings”. How those lyrics represent The Sandlot is beyond me, but it is this curious blend of often surreal lyrics with multiple singers, layered instruments, and an overly optimistic feel to each song that keeps you coming back time and time again.
Baker acts as the lead singer of the group, but you’d be hard pressed to find too many moments throughout the album where he isn’t joined by the rest of the band members harmonizing with him or wailing in unison in the background. Each song is so full of layered instruments like guitar, piano, keyboard, drums, xylophone, organ, banjo and melodica that you could listen to any given song multiple times and find something new each time.
The creative production value of Be He Me is just one reason this album has been so critically acclaimed among top indie critics. Baker’s songs are all self-contained stories that blend in and out of one another, with remnants of one song making their way into later songs, such as it does between “Complete or Completing” and “Ida, My”, where familiar lyrics appear then fade just as suddenly into an electronic landscape.
Baker tells stories of love and loss. Love usually relating to family, such as in the appropriately titled tracks “Brother”, “Mama”, and “Father”. Loss tends to be the subject of choice for Baker on the majority of his songs, even though he surrounds these bleak tales with unusually upbeat melodies. “Bleary Eyed” is the stand out track on the album, and easily the darkest lyrically as Baker sings “Critters by the litter come gushing out my eyes/Like fears yet worth the fright/So pour me a drink/I’ll spill this dark ink/I’ll tell you it’s all for you/But it ain’t/It’s just my way of coping/With this bleary-eyed baby girl…dying on my kitchen floor”. It took me a solid month to realize how depressing the lyrics were because I was too busy dancing to think about what I was singing.
Be He Me is an intriguing 50 minute journey into Adam Baker’s mind, but it never ceases to feel anything but sincere. It is an album that gives the listener the option of singing along and enjoying every minute of the music, or digging deeper into the lyrics and joining Annuals in the story they’ve weaved. It takes quite an album to accomplish this feat, and one can only wonder where Annuals will go from here having created such a memorable album at such a young age. It was my album of the year last year for a reason and it should be a unique musical experience for anyone curious enough to listen.
