The six musicians who make up Annuals are all under the age of 22, but you’d never guess it from the multi-layered, heavily textured sound of the North Carolina natives’ debut album, the inaptly named Be He Me. Behemoth would have been far more appropriate, given the epic nature of the songs, arrangements and the fact that (including the three bonus tracks), it weighs in at a hefty 60 minutes of organ, lap steel, banjo, melodica and xylophone, as well as the more traditional meat-and-two-veg of guitar, bass and drums.bitches inhabiting the songs.
If you’re looking for musical reference points, this melting pot of sound is like Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes fronting a band made up of members of Arcade Fire and Elbow, with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke handling production duties. But then it’s also like Mercury Rev meets The Beatles, or the aforementioned Mr. Banhart jamming with Gomez. Anyway, you get the ballpark...
From the sweeping opener ‘Brother’, which mutates from a gently lilting ballad of familial harmony to a torrent of distortion-laden noise over the course of three and a half minutes, to the almost honky-tonk ‘Complete, Or Completing’, Be He Me is chock-full of musical surprises, most of them welcome. You’re just never quite sure what’s going to come next, or in what new direction Baker is going to lead his merry ensemble. Take the sweet electronica background to ‘Carry You Around’, the funky bells of ‘The Bull And The Goat’, the Jeff Buckley-like ‘Chase You Off’ or the way ‘Ida, My’ morphs from a pastoral idyll to a crashed-out symphony.
That said, this is not one of those albums that is immediately going to blow your socks off: there’s just too much going on. In fact, I get the distinct feeling that this is a record I’m going to have to live with for some time before I really figure out how good it is, in the same way that Funeral,Illinois or even Tom McRae’s debut had a heady gestation period before they really worked their charms. For the moment, we’ll file under ‘interesting’: whether it hits ‘exciting’ in a couple of months’ time remains to be seen.