Annuals – Wet Zoo

Annuals is toying with you. You may notice to the right that the first link just takes you to the second. You also may notice that this record is made to look like a split with two bands, Annuals and Sunfold. Trouble is, each one has the same members. You’ll notice in the fine print though, that the songwriters are different for each “group” as are the publishers. Even the title, Wet Zoo, appears as though it was written hastily on the record cover, almost as though the printer forgot and someone had to write it in themselves.

Get used to it. Annuals rely on toying with the listener, creating tensions between folk-oriented instruments such as pedal steel and orchestral violins with bleeps from “various keys” as they print in the liner notes. A key change here, a song shift there, the record is almost Brechtian in the way that it doesn’t allow you to get sucked in. Any time you would be tempted to sing along, it shifts, never returning exactly the same way twice. Annuals relies on the myriad tropes of music but there’s always a sense that the whole thing is somewhat tongue in cheek, be it a “cute” solo on “Around Your Neck,” the aforermentioned key change at the end of “Sore” or the shift to Sunfold.

Sunfold’s contribution is less masked but as a result comes off as a little lazy. Don’t get me wrong, the harmonies are on point, the guitars are well-produced, and the drums move the band along. However, the last thing that the world needs right now is Annuals to have a pop-punk side-project, yikes. At the solo of “Between the Worlds” Sunfold sounds a bit more like Minus the Bear which is a nice moment, now if only the rest of it didn’t sound like another Chapel Hill throwback with something to prove or a slightly harder “Jump Little Children.” To be honest the whole “Sunfold” idea smacks of a bit of conceit rather than creativity.

Overall, this EP achieves what it’s meant to, it’s over just after you put it on and it whets your appetite for an LP that hopefully can marry their eclectic freneticisms with the song crafting that clearly goes in to each track. Let’s just hope that we’re treated with the excellence of Annuals and not their ego, alter or otherwise.

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