Experimental Indie Pop Outfit Comes Out Too Clea

Such Fun is clearly intended to be a pop album. I would be very surprised to find out that North Carolina’s Annuals walked into the studio with some weird, free jazz, proto-punk intentions, and instead limped out with eleven awkward tracks. But as a result, the album wears its pop-heart on its sleeve, carefully tailored slacks, and excessively groomed mustache. There can be no doubt that Fun is a certain type of mature, thoughtfully produced, outing. But neither of those qualities necessarily precipitates the kind of pop result that a band of Annuals individual caliber might want.

Because of its pop strivings, Such Fun often drifts into a very easy-listening kind of feel, and by that I mean it bears resemblances to something that would drop on mainstream radio snuggly next to that song about having a bad day. For most bands that wouldn’t be a bad thing at all, but I feel like it might be to Annuals. Their make-up alone has produced experimental rock goodies like those littered within their inaugural Be He Me and even sister band Sunfold’s affairs.  But Such Fun is definitely aiming at pop and in doing so set its sights on a clean and safe sound void of any - but much needed - jagged edges. There is brilliance to be found like the builds of ‘Hot Night Hounds’ and its sweltering beat that spill into swayer ‘Springtime’. Or the feverish violins of ‘Down The Mountain’ and its fiddling hoedown that ends all too quickly. But it’s the bizarre pop of beautifully sanitized ‘Hardwood Floor’ or awkward rocking ‘Talking’ that begin to tarnish the experimental gleam we knew of the band that ran amuck so prevalently before. Every downbeat and strum is so well placed the album becomes the kind of clinical misfire a lot of bands make when they try to do something polished and overshoot the mark.

It seems Annuals have reached an musical intersection; either be the kind of act that makes fuzzy music videos, or the kind that splice art clips where the band members materialize from a pile of sand at Eddie Murphy’s feet. I am a big believer in the global rotational theory of pop music, but Such Fun embodies so many of the problems that occur when the alternative try to produce the popular. The result is often lost somewhere in the no-man’s land between the teeth of screeching guitars and the fun of sugared up beats. Such Fun embodies too much of the latter.

Matthew Richardson