Annuals
Be He Me
[Ace Fu; 2006]
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. Diehard residents of actuality might even find the Annuals’ abstract plane inaccessible, or preferable at a distance.
Be He Me is a crowd, packed with hyperboloid songs that whorl and dimple, digressively executing competent-to-astonishing arrangements in a manner that would seem spazzy if they weren’t so polished. "Antic orchestral pop" would be the easiest cop-out I could put forth to describe their métier. For further touchstones, think the high-blood-sugar anthems of Rollerskate Skinny or early Mercury Rev, but with classic-rock sheen, earthier lyrical concerns, and worldbeat dalliances. "Carry Around" invokes exactly– exactly– the futuristic tropicalia that Beck was supposed to be perfecting by now. The disco-waltz "Complete or Completing" submerges into a Steely Dan tide, then locks into a chant-groove that is triumphantly resumed on album closer "Sway", which dips the last few years of indie-rock’s most-soiled dishes into a Ladysmith Black Mambazo rinse.
"Brother" is the album’s riotous, massive standout, but almost everything’s impressive: The purposeful shuffle of "Mama", the blurping bits of "Ida, My" that are as biomechanical as H.R. Giger’s alien design, the general unforcedness, the open-air funhouse moxie, etc. The album’s tragic flaw is that, despite the candyland ampedness and the taffylike thickness of the best tracks, Be He Me doesn’t offer the listener’s active, rational mind much to chew on. One feels too swept into Baker’s multicolor dustpan. Even as these songs synthesize tones I thought I might never hear together– those of Emerson Lake & Palmer, The Sea & Cake, and Ipecac’s roster– without licking Mars Volta’s cheese grater, they ultimately upstage themselves. At the beginning of "Carry Around", Baker warns us that he’s got "magic crying out my ass"; let’s hope he invests in a filter for gold and not a buttplug.
Posted to Pitchfork by William Bowers on November 13, 2006