Annuals:  An Irregular Pearl

Written by Ryan Ffrench

Photos by Randy Cremean 

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It took Brian Wilson five years and ten studio albums to push The Beach Boys’ sound to the creative potential that is Pet Sounds.  Tom Waits spent ten years singing the blues before he unleashed Swordfishtrombones on an unsuspecting music world.  Even Radiohead had to muscle their way through a few years of mid-tempo, mid-excitement alternative rock, remember?  So take note: North Carolina’s Annuals have reached comparison worthy heights of imaginative ambition with their self-recorded debut album, Be He Me. And none of them are over 22 years old. 

When lead singer/songwriter Adam Baker shrieks, “I got magic in my head, magic up my nose, magic coming out my fingers, magic crying out my eyes,” he is declaring the band’s aesthetic manifesto with a Fellini-esque predilection for fantasy and flamboyancy.  Annuals, like the Italian film maestro, have the appeal of a lavish circus, with Baker and his collective of band mates (Kenny Florence, Mike Robinson, Zack Oden, Nick Radford and Anna Spence) trading instruments and dynamics each song to create a world that is equal parts playful exuberance, dreamlike fluidity and baroque imagination.  Their sound is diverse, experimental and idiosyncratic—but it is Be He Me’s almost overwhelming ambition in both composing and recording that sets Annuals apart from their indie rock contemporaries.  

Moments before I sat down with Adam Baker and Kenny Florence for this interview, Annuals put on an astonishing live show for an enthusiastic crowd who arrived early to see them open for no-wavers Blonde Redhead.  Their set was concentrated and intense, delivering a myriad of intricate textures and polyrhythmic arrangements while offering a sincere test for the sound system of Austin’s Stubb’s BBQ.  Standing in the crowd and desperately trying to follow the performance onstage, I was repeatedly struck with novelist Milan Kundera’s phrase “the enormous force of the baroque” as Annuals added layer upon layer of elaborate sonic detail.  Like a Rubens painting or a Sir Christopher Wren cathedral, Annuals music is distinguished by its sense of movement and its unpredictable, yet precise, details. 

“It’s just a matter of experimentation really,” explains guitarist Kenny Florence, “It’s just trying different things until it all sounds right.”  Easy enough with a professional team of producers and sound engineers, sure, but what he doesn’t mention here is that Annuals recorded Be He Me in a friend’s basement.   

Still, primary songwriter Adam Baker makes it sound simple.  “Everyone is always hanging out there anyway, so as parts come people will step in and say: ‘hey, let me lay down something’ –that’s how it goes; it’s really laid back.”  Difficult to imagine if you listen closely to the album:  I tried to count the number of tracks running at one time in some of the songs and ran out of fingers and toes.   

“The most is what, seventy? Seventy at one time,” admits Florence.  

Baker looks away nonchalantly:  “Yeah, it’s stupid sometimes. I take it too far.”  So where to after a brilliant debut album of this magnitude?  “Well, 120 tracks,” he immediately quips, leaving me and, I think, his guitarist a little unsure whether or not he is joking.  

This is a band that gives off the impression that they would have been perfectly happy to keep recording and recording their album for the next five years, thus is the immensity of the obsession to refine their art.  It doesn’t take Baker long to confirm this notion.  “Every song on Be He Me has at least three other versions.  They were all a work in progress.  It was almost sad that we had to turn in a record because I wanted to keep working on the damn thing until it was perfect.  By the end of the record I felt really rushed and kept thinking: god, I want to do this whole song over.  This just isn’t right— I guess I’ll just have to wait for the second record.” 

The extent to which Annuals are in complete control of the recording process has immediately tangible results on the finished product.  Despite their music’s complex and disparate stylizations, Be He Me is an album with an undeniably cohesive finish.  It is a work bearing the signature of an auteur, an attribute that Baker does not take lightly.  “That is one of the most important elements of Annuals, for sure,” he says.  “We had been paying for studio time, so we just learned how to do it so that we could do it ourselves.  Then we could actually form all of our ideas rather than having to tell someone else how to do them.”   

And don’t think he will relinquish any of the creative authority over Annuals recordings in the near future.  “No.  Never. That is the most important thing to me.  I will never ever give that up.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.”  Suddenly the tone in his usually playful voice has become unmistakably serious.   

In the postmodern world of indie rock, where self-referencing bands seem to rely solely on irony and the tightness of their jeans to stay hip, this is a refreshingly authentic approach for a young band to take.  Annuals are dedicated to the quality of their craft, believing strongly that “everything should be done for the aesthetic,” as Florence explains.   

Baker agrees:  “That’s a huge thing for me, at least. When I listen to a lot of bands I’m thinking:  you guys could have done better than that!  You didn’t have to downplay yourselves to be DIY.”   

“Like being sloppy on the guitar just because it’s badass—not because it’s aesthetically pleasing,” adds Florence, dispelling any possible rumors of an upcoming album of Pixies and MC5 cover songs.

Baker’s passion for genuine quality in music seems to inspire in him an eloquent nostalgia:  “It’s really a shame when music becomes a trend, because music is one of the most timeless things that human beings have and it is one of the only things that will be around forever.  It’s been around since we have been able to talk—it’s a part of folklore—and when you start manufacturing it.”  Here he almost trails off in his own disillusionment, before regaining composure and adding, “The worst thing is that it’s so hard to find really great bands these days.  [The great bands] just get looked over because people don’t know how to listen to them yet, because they haven’t listened to it yet with another band.”

Florence nods his head, concurring, “Because their friend hasn’t told them about it.” 

Evidently these guys are not interested in playing at their status as the newest buzz band floating around the trend-setting blogosphere.  They gently shrug off the waves of comparisons that critics continually throw at their sound.  Article after article pits Annuals as an indie rock hybrid of Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene and even Animal Collective, to which Baker replies, “Fine. It’s whatever they want to do.”  For the sake of clarification he then points out, “Arcade Fire I heard of two months before our record came out, Animal Collective I didn’t hear of until after its release, and Broken Social Scene, well, I still haven’t listened to a whole record.  But people love those bands, and we want people to love us.  So if people like those bands I want people to compare us to them.” 

While these bands do function as a legitimate point of access to Annual’s sound, many of their influences come from bands that rose back in the good old days before MySpace ruled the music industry elite.  It is impossible to listen to the excellent “Complete and Completing” without hearing the influence of Brian Wilson’s legendary harmonic experimentations.  In fact, the Pet Sounds era Beach Boys aesthetic is all over Be He Me, a point that Baker himself readily admits.  “You can probably hear the exact same arrangements in any given Brian Wilson song.”  However, Annuals reinterpret Wilson’s ideas to work within their own concise approach to songwriting–no small feat to those of us who think of Pet Sounds as arguably the greatest rock album of all time and see Wilson as the unquestionable master of pop music composition.

Of course, not even this satisfies these two.  “That’s why we’ve just got to step it up for the next record.  Five part harmonies.  Four-person band,” muses Florence, further proving the scope of their ambition. 

Don’t expect Annuals to limit their artistic aspirations to the agonizingly constrictive medium of rock music.   I asked the guys if they would consider lending their compositional talents to film scoring, mentioning Broken Social Scene’s recent work on Half Nelson and James Mercer’s score for, um, a documentary about the role of the modern tugboat, and was met with their characteristic enthusiasm.  “My dream is to have the means to do something like that,” raves Florence, “The ideas that I think of in my head are orchestral, symphonic. I want to explore that.” 

The thought struck a chord with Baker.  He suddenly leveled and became quite matter-of-fact, promising: “We will be taking an orchestra on tour.”  This is a remarkable declaration coming from the mouth of a nineteen year old. It is considerably more so coming from the mouth of someone who sounded like they just said:  “We will be playing in Houston tomorrow night.” 

This last comment seems to instigate a musical Santa-list, whereupon both Baker and Florence feed off each other’s conception of their future: 

Baker: “Some day when we have that capability we are going to use it to its fullest extent.  All I want is to just have a trailer with seats in it and we can just throw people in who play strings.  I would kill for that situation.” 

Florence: “I want to do a concert with a football field full of people playing instruments.” 

Baker: “I want a marching band.  It’s just silly.  You can hear by listening to the record how much we love the sound of a bunch of musicians coming together and making such a powerful thing.” 

Florence: “You just want to keep going.  You want to get better.” 

So if even Wilson, Waits and Radiohead played to creatively restricting genres for a period in their early development, how is it, I keep wondering, that this group of twenty year olds seem to have so comprehensively refined their conception of their musical voice, their sense of self?  Then the truth:  “Oh, we used to play in a pop punk band,” admits Baker, “we opened for Brand New back before they were famous.”

Showing a good-humored sense of appreciation for their ‘youthful’ days, Florence adds, “That was a really good show. I think I was fifteen at the time.” But pop punk?  Annuals? 

Baker explains the directional change, sounding more like a time-wizened forty year old than an enthusiastic teenager:  “It was definitely a conscientious decision to stop writing music to a specific audience.  We started writing music just for the ideas coming from the head and not for other people.”

Florence agrees, “For a long time we were young impressionable kids writing songs like we thought our favorite bands would write songs, instead of writing songs like we should be writing them.  We were playing with bands that all sounded like us, and then we thought: wait a minute, maybe it’s just because we’re listening too hard.  So we just cut ourselves off and started writing whatever excited us.”  Note to all of you who are over the age of nineteen and still consider of yourself ‘young’:  Annuals don’t. 

It’s clear that Annuals take their own advice; Baker’s lyrics clearly depict a man writing about things that excite him.  His storytelling is deeply personal, but, like all great art, manages to transcend the autobiographical and speak the universal human consciousness.  He combines memory with fantasy and invention to create a pastiche of metaphorical imagery that further establishes him as a force of baroque imagination. “I want people to listen to it and think:  this makes me feel better.  Or this totally sings to my sadness right now.  That is what I listen to music for,” says Baker, defining his lyrical intentions.  “I feel like I have begun to trust myself.  If it touches me, I feel like it might touch other people, too.” 

Let’s hope he continues to explore this trust.  Be He Me is surely one of the most intricate and intriguing pop albums of the past few years, illustrating an intense artistic integrity driven by an ambition that evidently sees no limits.  Annuals’ music is an eccentric carnival–a harlequinade of senses and illusions that showcases the band’s interest in the elaborate, the ornate and the difficult, firmly placing atop the neo-baroque movement in contemporary music.

Call them orchestral pop or experimental rock or whatever—their style will continue to elude classification and leave critics bumbling for comparisons.  If you could see the sincerity in Florence’s eyes when he exudes, “We’ve got so many ideas right now that we’re starting to forget them,” it would be impossible not to believe that this is the band that critics will be referring to fifteen years from now in their attempts to describe the new wave of upcoming young bands. 

And yet, I am constantly reminded of this term–‘baroque’–and, being one of these bumbling critics myself, would like to posit the term “neo-baroque pop” as a general description of the band’s aesthetic.  The term itself is a French translation of the Portuguese phrase pérola barroca, which literally means ‘an irregular pearl’.  And this is as fitting an image as I can imagine to characterize the beauty of Annuals’ music.