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[Oxford American]
North Carolina band navigates the ephemeral blogosphere.
by BILL WASIK
On July 17, 2006, a blogger named Mike on a music site called Postcore.com made what can only be called a preemptive strike. “[W]ord on the street,” Mike wrote, “is that Pitchfork”—the Internet’s most influential music site, and arguably the independent music scene’s chief tastemaker, online or off—“is getting the jump on this band tomorrow, which means we’re going to throw it out there today.” He went on:
[T]his band’s got it all: young songwriter who begs for the “wunderkind” title...inventive and semi-electronic production, full support from the most influential music blog out there (not this one), songs that explode halfway through, and about a hundred music blogs who feel the pressure to write about a different band every day. I’m just saying, get ready to get sick of hearing about this band.
“Get ready to get sick of hearing about this band”—it would be difficult to think of a more apt motto for indie rock in the age of the Internet. A loose genre defined not by any sound but rather by its opposition to (or exclusion from) corporate radio and labels, indie rock evolved out of the hardcore scene of the 1980s, at a time when finding out about important new bands depended much on whom you knew or where you were: News spread almost exclusively through word of mouth, through photocopied ’zines (often with circulations in three or even two digits), or through low-watt college radio stations.
Today, indie-rock culture remains an underground culture, basically by definition, in that its fans shun mainstream music in favor of lesser-known acts. But now, MySpace, iTunes, and Internet radio make location and friends irrelevant for discovering music. Blogs and aggregators enable fans to determine in just a few minutes what everyone else is listening to that day. What you know, where you are—these matter not at all. To be an insider today one must merely be fast. Once Mike found out that Pitchfork would be posting about the new band, one cannot blame him for his haste, because après Pitchfork, le déluge: Unknown bands become all-too-familiar bands in a month, and abandoned bands the next month. Get ready, that is, to get sick.
As promised, half past ten on the morning of July 18 saw Ryan Schreiber, the founder and editor-in-chief of Pitchfork, place his imprimatur upon the new band, which he likened to “some fantasy hybrid of Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, and Broken Social Scene.” His readers would know these names, bands that ranked among the most successful indie-rock acts of the previous four years, and all (not coincidentally) owed a debt to Pitchfork in getting there. Schreiber had essentially launched Broken Social Scene’s career when he described their American debut album—which he had found just by “dig[ging] through the boxes upon boxes of promos that arrive at the Pitchfork mailbox each month”—as “endlessly replayable, perfect pop.” More recently, a Schreiber review had conferred indie-rock superstardom on Brooklyn’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah; the group did not even have a record deal (the band had self-produced its album). What makes Pitchfork so powerful is not the size of its readership, which by web-magazine standards is small—one and a half million visitors each month, only a fraction of whom read the site regularly—but its stature in the firmament of indie-rock blogs as a kind of North Star, a point of reference to be measured against. A glowing Pitchfork review need not be agreed with, but it must at the very least be reckoned with.
In his post about the new band, Schreiber concluded with a wink to his site’s clout. “Get familiar now,” he wrote, “we could be writing about these dudes all year long.” Predictably, by the end of August, more than thirty blogs had posted about the new band, and the album’s leaked tracks became fixtures on the Top-20 list at Elbo.ws, a site that monitors plays of downloaded music.
Once Pitchfork blesses an act, any mention of that act on other blogs needs to be accompanied by an acknowledgment that one has lagged terribly behind the times. On September 7, Stereogum.com not only quoted Pitchfork’s review but wrote, “The hype machine”—by which they presumably meant blogs like themselves, because not a single dollar had yet gone into promoting the new band—“has been in motion for this band, so we feel sorta silly calling them a Band to Watch (we know, we know...you blogged about them first.)” Even so, the first comment, just fifteen minutes after the post, began with one word in all caps: “DUH.” By September 18, Idolator, the music blog of Gawker Media’s online empire, could pull back for a world-weary dissection of the new band as phenomenon, complete with “Odds of Backlash,” which it placed at five-to-one. On October 5, when Rolling Stone magazine’s “Rock & Roll Daily” blog finally weighed in, with an unctuous pronouncement of phony hipness—“Trust us on this one: you guys are gonna seriously sweat us for introducing you” to this band—commenter “nick” unloaded with justifiably righteous scorn:
yeah...everyone is really gonna “sweat you” for being (LITERALLY) the last blog on the Internet to write baout (sic) these guys.
The band is called Annuals, and they hail from Raleigh, North Carolina. I first heard the tracks on October 14, three days before the official release of Be He Me, Annuals’ first album, but three months too late. Their sound is difficult to describe, especially to those who have not heard Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, or Broken Social Scene, bands that plumb the sonic expansiveness afforded by our high-tech, DIY musical age, when one can emerge from one’s basement with meticulously untidy, offhandedly epic music. And if these other bands are epic, Annuals are more so. Within a single song, the vocal might rise from tender contemplation to a wail or even a hoarse, toneless scream; drums, hitherto absent, suddenly charge in, mammoth, driving, relentless, with two or even three kits going at once; arpeggios from various synths and strings wander in and out, while electronica decorates the margins, a layered sheet of rigorous noise. Whether you buy or steal I do not care; just find the tracks and listen. What they will sound like to you today I cannot say, but that autumn, Annuals sounded like the future.
1 Star
Last Fall I met Annuals in New York at a vegan grocery/café on the Lower East Side. They had come to the city for the CMJ Music Marathon, a sort of indie-rock hajj for hundreds of bands, some of whom play to capacity crowds while others, bleeding flagellants, must play to almost no one—as I learned firsthand earlier in the week when, at the 7 p.m. set of a band I had liked online (a wistful countrified act called the Western States Motel), I found myself in an audience of perhaps a half-dozen, a situation in which one finds rock bands starting to make discomforting levels of eye contact. But already it had been guaranteed that Annuals would draw a crowd. Although the band’s time slot was poor—number two on a six-band bill—their success at the festival had been essentially preordained, as everyone had seen the online blowup and modified their expectations accordingly. Even the New York Times, the day I met the band, had fingered Annuals, with their “grand, disheveled songs,” as the festival act most likely to make good.
The orchestrator of Annuals is Adam Baker, a scruffy-but-strikingly-purposive twenty year old. A meld of hipster and hippie, he wore a green hoodie, rolled up cords, and junked-out white Asics, but also kept a little ponytail, a thin, messy beard, and a satiny blue choker. He spoke with a businesslike patter, his eyes darting around, a young man residing very much inside his own capacious head. With his mouth full of some sort of health food, he talked to me about creative control and how he aimed to maintain it. “That’s been, like, our only rider throughout this whole thing,” he said. “You can’t force us to do it any other way than how we know how. We had tried recording with producers from the start, doing all the tracking with someone else and having them at the board? But it really makes us uncomfortable, and the sound doesn’t come out exactly how we want it.”
Instead, Adam recorded (often playing all the parts) and produced all the songs essentially by himself. If he owed the Internet for his band’s sudden popularity, he owed his creative control to an equally revolutionary technology: PC-based sound-engineering software, particularly the cheap (a stripped-down version is free), remarkably powerful, and now basically ubiquitous ProTools; Adam is of a generation of musicians accustomed to producing CD-quality music in their teenage bedrooms. He has wrecked one of his eardrums, but unlike rockers of yore he incurred his injury not with amps but with headphones.
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Lead guitar in Annuals is handled by Kenny Florence, a gregarious, almost antic nineteen year old with a baby face and thick black hair closely cropped. The six members of Annuals also play together as a band called Sedona, a sort of indie-bluegrass affair led by Kenny; Adam plays drums. In fact, it was while on tour as Sedona, in the van, that they got the call from a record label that had discovered Adam’s Annuals songs on MySpace. Now Sedona lingered in the background while Annuals got its turn. “Annuals is our main project right now,” Kenny said, “but we plan on putting out lots of different albums with lots of different styles and lots of different ideas.... We’re planning on pretty much just, like—I don’t know what the word is—exploding people’s brains with all of the projects that we’re doing, you know?”
“The intention is to get a dynasty together, I guess,” added Adam. They spoke in the half-ironic tone affected today when expressing great dreams. In the meantime, Kenny still lived with his parents, while Adam roomed with the bassist Mike Robinson. “In my mom’s basement,” interjected Mike. “Can’t lie.”
“Can’t afford a fucking apartment, man,” said Adam.
“We’re still climbing the hill,” Mike said, philosophically.
Kenny, Adam, and Mike have been playing together since their early teens, when they started a punk band called Timothy’s Weekend. They said that was in 2000—2000!—and suddenly their youth struck me. They played with the sophisticated sound of bands five or ten years older.
“We’ve been probably playing music together for the same amount of time they’ve been playing,” Kenny pointed out.
“We just got a head start, that’s all,” offered Adam. He added that they hadn’t even listened to Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, or Broken Social Scene until the comparisons started. His own influences, he said, tended toward Paul Simon and Brian Wilson. “They’re just trying to compare us to bands that are current, you know?” he said. “There’s not really anyone else they can compare us to.” He paused. “I think.”
1 Star
Everyone I know listens to indie rock. At the older end, some still hang onto bands from their day, while others are “graduating” towards classical or jazz; at the younger end, some fold mainstream hip-hop into their mix, while others dabble in metal or trance. But everyone I know listens to indie rock. They all vote Democrat, too, and in this regard we reside in the “urban archipelago,” as a very smart essay in Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger called the urban-liberal consensus just after the heartbreaking (for us) 2004 election. But more remarkable than this nationwide political consensus is the nationwide cultural consensus that has sprung up within or alongside it, among hundreds of thousands of young adults, and not only in big cities, but in college towns and even rural retreats. Journalists rarely write about this consensus, perhaps because most of them reside squarely inside it. One might call it the hipster consensus, to use the somewhat unfortunate term that (for better or for worse) has come to denote these educated young Americans; and no cultural genre defines this consensus more than does indie rock.
If this hipster archipelago is a virtual community, it is building up its own virtual institutions, which use the Internet to harmonize the far-flung members, to allow these thousands of disparate agents to maintain a near-instantaneous and deceptively easy unanimity. Pitchfork serves as one of these institutions, as does the Gawker Media network of blogs (which includes the aforementioned Idolator, as well as Gawker in New York, Defamer in L.A., and a handful of other, nongeographically aligned offerings). But perhaps more intriguing than either of these is KEXP, a real-world public-radio station in Seattle that attracts a significant portion of its listenership online. Its three prime-time DJs play almost entirely indie-rock, with selections that (broadly) mirror the lineups, themselves converging, of the nation’s indie-rock clubs. And indeed, a list of KEXP’s top-twelve cities for online listenership reads like a hipster-archipelago roll call (albeit weighted understandably westward): 1. Seattle, 2. New York, 3. Minneapolis, 4. Portland, Ore., 5. Chicago, 6. San Francisco, 7. Los Angeles, 8. Washington, D.C., 9. Vancouver, 10. Denver, 11. Atlanta, 12. Austin (Numbers 13 and 15, curiously enough, are Beijing and Guangzhou, in China).
Although it should be stressed that the actual online tribe of KEXP, like that of Pitchfork, is relatively small—62,000 unique visitors per week—it nevertheless functions as a crucial pollinator of sounds, injecting the same new bands at the exact same time into similar social groups around the world.
The week I met Annuals, during the CMJ festival in New York, KEXP played host to a series of studio appearances by what one could only call, without any cynicism, some of the new bands of the season—Bound Stems, Hot Chip, White Whale, Forward Russia, Tokyo Police Club, What Made Milwaukee Famous—as well as appearances from such admired older bands as the Shins and the Apples in Stereo. (Annuals had already recorded at the station in Seattle, a few weeks beforehand.) The day I visited, the show featured a Norwegian electronic band called 120 Days. In a blond-wood-paneled anteroom, the audience sat on folding chairs while behind the studio window the band gamely tried, as synth acts must, to give off the appearance of “rocking” while they attended to their machines. All of them strained to lurch about kinetically as they tweaked the knobs on their Korgs.
Midway through this rather arid demonstration, I sat down with John Richards, KEXP’s morning-show host and probably the most listened-to indie-rock DJ in the nation. Richards has a slight build, an elfin face, and dirty-blond hair parted down the middle. Thirty-three years old, Richards started as an intern at the station (under its previous name, KCMU) and worked his way all the way up to drivetime. His taste is bulletproof; I find myself constantly checking the real-time playlist during his online broadcasts to catch the band names. When I asked him about the “virtual community” of indie rock, he knew just what I was talking about. He brought up the band Tapes ’n Tapes, a breakout act of spring 2006 (Pitchfork review: 8.3 out of 10) that, perversely, had not even attracted much of an audience in its own hometown of Minneapolis until it was picked up by the various blogs and by KEXP.
“A listener in Austin told me about it,” Richards recalled. “I sent somebody off to find the music—find this right away, I said.... We got the demo from the band within a week, and started playing it.” The trick in breaking bands, Richards said, is repetition. “Cowbell”—Tapes ’n Tapes’ first hit, a driving raw thing—“was the song I was hitting constantly. And just kept hitting it, and hitting it, and hitting it, and then all of a sudden you saw their hometown suddenly react to a station playing their band. And then it just grew from there.”
But why did so many of these bands disappear? What about the second album, or the third? Why did indie rock seem to have become wave after wave of disposable new bands? “You have these bands working really, really hard, they’re writing great songs, they’ve had five years maybe; and their best material is going to make it on their first album,” Richards said. But then, he went on, “you have a label involved at this point, you have deadlines now—another album in six months, nine months.”
Richards said he now assumed that he would not even see second albums, no matter how good their sound. “Even an Annuals,” he said. “I’m not even thinking about a second album from them. I just assume that this is the document that I have.... You think: ‘This is a great movie—I hope there’s not a sequel.’”
But Richards acknowledged that he and the other indie-rock tastemakers bore some share of the blame. “A big deal with us is discovery,” he said. “And you’re discovering not just a song; you’re discovering a band. When you’re just discovering a second album, there’s not as much hype involved.” He began to recount his own discovery of the Pixies, in 1988, and as he spoke his speech became subtly emotional, his hands began to clench. “I heard Surfer Rosa, and it changed my life. And you know, all the other albums I heard after that were great, but man, it never equaled that.... It was like a drug, I guess. You take the drug, you never get that high again, you know?”
He laughed at this, but he was coming to the crux of something: “It gets harder and harder to achieve that. You keep thinking—I want to be the one to discover that band. When you hear someone talk about Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and you’re hearing that David Byrne loves them, or David Bowie. And—wow, I saw them! And it was packed!
“But the second time,” he went on, “well, now it sold out early, and it’s at a bigger club. And I’m not that guy anymore. I’m not the guy discovering them. I’m just a guy who is with everybody else who also knows who they are.”
1 Star
One unlikely outpost of the hipster archipelago can be found in a strip mall in Carrboro, North Carolina. At the rightmost end of a startlingly hideous facade, the top half of which consists of some strange, brown, corrugated metal that harkens back to 1980s slapdash futurism, the Cat’s Cradle sits nonchalantly, as if a rock club somehow naturally belonged there alongside the video store and the Amanta Gourmet Pizza. Despite its prosaic setting, the club is a longstanding and vital node in the national indie-rock network. To scan the list of bands playing at Cat’s Cradle in any given year is to get a decent sense for the “big” indie bands that are touring the United States that year; one would find general overlap with any list of bands playing at, for example, the Bowery Ballroom or the Knitting Factory, in New York; at the 9:30 Club or the Black Cat, in Washington, D.C.; at First Avenue or the 400 Bar, in Minneapolis; at the Middle East, in Boston; at Hailey’s, in Denton, Texas; at the Casbah, in San Diego; at the Earl, in Atlanta; at the Metro or the Abbey, in Chicago; at Bimbo’s or the Independent, in San Francisco; at Chop Suey or the Showbox, in Seattle; at the shows put on in Philadelphia by Sean Agnew’s R5 Productions, many of which take place in the basement of a Unitarian church—an even odder spot, perhaps, for indie-rock shows than a strip mall. In January, three months after I first met Annuals in New York, I came to see them in their hometown, or roughly so: All of them got their start playing music at the Cat’s Cradle and the other clubs in Carrboro, and Chapel Hill, home to UNC, which Carrboro abuts. While the band waited to do their soundcheck, we sat around in the green room, which looked much like green rooms in seedy rock clubs anywhere: a dorm-room fridge, haphazardly arrayed scraps of torn carpet, fourth-hand upholstered furniture with the springs distended out the undersides.
“Whose Pop-Tarts are these?” asked Anna Spence, the slender redhead who plays keyboards in the band.
“Mine,” said Kenny.
“Ours,” said Adam, whose show preparations consisted of pacing around while using a lighter to burn decorative holes in his white collared shirt. “That’s our rider, baby! Pop-Tarts.”
By indie-rock standards, the past three months had been extraordinarily good to Annuals: an appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, a full-page article in Rolling Stone. But they were still, as Mike had put it, “climbing the hill,” and the band’s patience with touring seemed to be fraying somewhat. “There’s a plan to take a big break,” Adam said, “because we’ve got all these other projects.” He was speaking chiefly of Sedona, in which he drums—“I’m dying to get back behind the set,” he said. He rattled off two other side projects: The bassist Mike had a “folk-pop” act called First Person Plural, plus Adam was planning an electronica act called Tundra.
Annuals was coming through their hometown with almost no fanfare, opening for the Dears—an unfortunately maudlin rock act from Montreal, whose songs, as a friend put it later during the show, resembled nothing so much as “a musical about an indie-rock band.” I couldn’t help but think about how the whole notion of a homegrown scene, here as elsewhere, had disappeared. Fifteen years ago, to be sure, national bands came through the Chapel Hill-area clubs, but the idea of a Chapel Hill band, or a Chapel Hill sound, was very much alive; the lo-fi pop sensibility of Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, and Polvo defined a local identity. Today in Chapel Hill, former members of Superchunk run Merge Records, arguably the nation’s most influential indie label—but its bands hail from around the U.S., Canada, and even Europe. Annuals, whose label was based until recently in a cramped one-bedroom apartment on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, summoned no more excitement in their own hometown than they did anywhere else.
The members are too young to have experienced this erosion of the local, but they grasp its import; Zack, Annuals’ other guitarist, noted that thanks to KEXP, they had sold more records in Seattle than in their hometown. As music fans, they all recognized how the Internet shaped their own listening habits: the roaming for the new band that always lurks just around the corner. “There’s two sides to that shit,” Adam said, when I asked him about the Internet. “One side is it’s a really wonderful way to discover all kinds of music. But then it also completely taints you. It makes you not enjoy music as long.”
“It shortens your attention span,” added Zack. “Because you can always access new stuff.”
“Just like everything else, every day,” said Adam, with resignation.
I asked about the name Annuals, a question I had been turning over in my mind ever since I first heard of the band.
“Actually, I remember the moment that I thought of the word,” Adam said. “I was coming home from school, and I was looking at one of my mom’s flowers. And I had just, like, started recording my little side project shit. And I thought: Annuals.”
I felt relieved to know that the name did not mean for him what it had come to mean for me, a melancholy vision of a beautiful band built, constitutionally, to die. I had begun to imagine all of my wanderings through rock clubs and festivals, through blogs and social networks and download sites, as the meandering of a floraphile through resplendent gardens that will flourish only for a season; to imagine all the remarkable new bands, seemingly inexhaustible in supply, as dazzling marigolds, begonias, fuchsias, their palettes brilliant but their roots fragile, incapable of abiding a frost.
1 Star
The South by Southwest festival, held each March in Austin, Texas, serves as indie rock’s national convention, a four-day caucus at which all the ambitious indie acts clamor to mount the dais. The number of acts at the festival has swelled to more than fifteen hundred, performing on some sixty separate official stages, and this does not include the countless unofficial bands, on unofficial stages, hoping to be seen by the thousands of indie-industry functionaries who roam the streets with their all-access badges. Every alleyway or back patio of every club or store seemed to have a tent with a band blaring away underneath.
KEXP had set up shop on the UT-Austin campus, broadcasting its in-studio appearances from the set of Austin City Limits, the legendary music show. I caught up with John Richards the following afternoon, a Thursday, shortly after he signed off his shift, and we sat down in a spare, lofty office just off the set. Only half a year since Richards and I first met, I found him obsessed with an entirely new slate of bands. “It almost worries me that the burnout is going to happen in a week instead of six months,” he said, only half joking. There was a wave of new British acts: pop-punk bands the Holloways and the Fratellis (the latter of which had just had their song “Flathead” turned into an iPod ad); the retro-soul songstress Amy Winehouse; and Fujiya and Miyagi, a hypnotic and danceable electronic outfit. (The station had been playing so much of these and other U.K. acts, Richards said, that fans were wondering if it had changed to an all-British format.) There were the other domestic bands of the moment, including Deerhunter, the Ponys, and Menomena, all smart, admirably difficult acts that had each released a couple of albums before but for some reason were just blowing up now. Annuals did not come up.
The very first band Richards mentioned in his list, the band “at the top of their game,” as Richards put it, was Peter Bjorn and John, a Swedish act best known for their song “Young Folks,” a laidback and likable dance number built on a dispiritingly addictive whistle riff.
Peter Bjorn and John had built this simple figure into a cacophony of attention, by way of the typical channels. Pitchfork bestowed an 8.5 on the full album, Writer’s Block, and then chose them to headline the website’s own South by Southwest party—a spot that one could imagine almost any of the 1,500 bands would have accepted. KEXP put them on their live bill, too; Peter Bjorn and John was the band I had come to see. They were to go on at quarter till two in the afternoon, and I sat in the near-empty bleachers and watched them set up.
The stage set of Austin City Limits seemed, at first glance, like an incongruous backdrop for indie rock. A kitschily stylized Austin skyline in the evening, it managed to render a too-sleepy city even sleepier-seeming in miniature. For that matter, Peter Bjorn and John (their actual names) seemed an incongruous indie-rock trio, at least visually speaking: The first two, who have played together for a decade, were mop-topped, fashionably unkempt fellows in tight black jeans, whereas the third, the drummer, wore a suit jacket over a crisp-white dress shirt, his black hair impeccably styled to one side, his overall look resembling that of a villainous investment-banker in an ’80s movie (I later discovered he was not John, but a pinch-hit percussionist named Nino). But stage and band seemed to come together fine when they started up; the stands, which for the other bands that day had been half-empty, if that, were full.
Before I arrived in Austin, I realized that Annuals’ season in a fickle sun had ended, and I found that my marvel at the ever-flowering garden of good-enough bands, had given way, I must confess, to a species of anger. Peter Bjorn and John, too, awed, and so did these other bands, but what about the bands from six months prior—Annuals, but also White Whale, Bound Stems, Tokyo Police Club, bands whose names even you, unfaithful reader, perhaps have already forgotten from just a few pages prior? I had begun to forget them, too. We falter like the others, enjoying the stories put in front of us today and forgetting the rest. How can we resist the new story, the one that everyone else is listening to, linking to, cueing up at parties? “Young Folks” was exactly that track, and as Peter Bjorn and John started, I couldn’t help but get a thrill, despite myself, and the rest of the crowd clearly did, too. Some teenagers, who earlier on had improbably bounded out from the wings to sit Indian-style before the stage, now rose to their feet and began to dance, as unself-consciously as teenagers are able to, and in that heartbreakingly loose-limbed style they seem to prefer. Peter, it must be said, whistled with astonishing skill, performing the difficult riff over and over again without falter, but wait—halfway through, there is a malfunction; his lips unpurse and yet the whistle goes on—he has been lip-synching the whistle. And now, acknowledging his mistake, Peter begins to laugh as he sings, and Bjorn begins to laugh, too, and now John, as well, all cracking up at their mighty hit, cut off at the knees.
1 Star
Annuals also performed at South by Southwest. As all the bands with any reputation did, they played multiple shows, of which I saw the first and the last. At the first, in a tented patio abutting a bar, they shared the bill with a band called Illinois, a dreamily ramshackle, banjo-driven rock act that was just then in the throes of blowup: Idolator that very week dissected Illinois’ buzz in almost identical fashion to their post about Annuals six months prior, down to the same cynical “Odds of Backlash”: five-to-one. The tent filled for Illinois, but most of the crowd stayed for Annuals.
The last Annuals show of the festival I happened onto by chance, as I walked with my wife up Trinity Street. The band was loading equipment from their big white van into the Austin Convention Center, where they were to tape a few songs for a radio station. While the band waited to go on, we all lay around on the floor in the main corridor, a sunny, echoing plate-glassed atrium some sixty feet high and three football fields long.
After the show, they had a two-week break, and they were finally going to use it to record as Sedona—Kenny’s band, the band they’d been before Annuals got signed. Adam wanted to finish a few songs for Tundra. “And we might start on BandAnd,” he added, then noticed my quizzical look and explained: BandAnd was the hard-rock band to be run by Zack.
“I think that’ll have to be on our next break,” Zack averred.
“It’s like avant-garde metal fusion, pretty much,” Kenny said.
“It’s all of us trying to be as technical and heavy as possible,” Zack said.
“We’ve got, like, little riffs that we’ve written for it,” Kenny said. “We haven’t put anything together fully, but we’ve got a lot of ideas.”
Annuals might be the perfect name, I realized, in a different way than I thought. Maybe their destiny is to be a march of bands in themselves, not one fuchsia in the frost, but a thousand blooming in succession. Maybe they, and maybe we all, will learn to make art, to find narrative, in this churning, viral culture by embodying the churn, embracing it, by envisioning a life not as some decades-long epic, but as a succession of discretely plotted six-month shorts. Maybe, moreover, we are becoming so fragmented, so besotted on the specificities of our cultural subdivisions, that the future historians of the twenty-first century, maintaining their collaborative wiki-textbooks while they lounge about in silvery bodysuits, will identify our era to be when the story ended, as it were, the end not of history but of history as narrative—of the fiction that a culture, or even a subculture, is an arrow.
The last song Annuals played in the taping was one I’d never heard them do live: a sublimely meditative track called “Ease My Mind.” Kenny had written it; he sang lead vocals and played a blistering acoustic. Where Annuals, lyrically, was achingly broken, this song was elliptically spiritual. “I like everyone to be this holy,” Kenny sang,
Tell us, tell us, are you real?
What do you feel?
Spread the diamond dust because I need it
More than peace of mind, this is—
This is divine
It was a gorgeous song, lilting and lovely. It was not an Annuals song, even though it was becoming that. It was a Sedona song. The same thing but another thing entirely.
http://www.oxfordamericanmag.com/content.cfm?ArticleID=255&Entry=Extras
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