Frelen Mas (Be He Me B-Sides) [Frelen Mas EP (Be He Me B-sides)]

In the wake of Be He Me, Annuals became marginally famous in a manner that had little to do with their actual music and lots to do with the current intersection of online music crit and fandom. As Bill Wasik's Oxford American essay explained it, the over-stimulated, barely-legal North Carolinians were the representative recepients of the Web-based meritocratic hype-churn, with those not enough in front of the curve resigned to making comments about their lateness to the party. The expansive, scattered praise Wasik documents echoes the sound of the Annuals' actual music, too (he writes: "that autumn, Annuals sounded like the future"): Both were free-for-alls with penchants for hyperbolic swoops of emotion.

Indeed, Be He Me was a document of the giddy thrills of unfettered youthful experimentataion-- in the studio and, er, the other kind. Songs that started pleasantly enough often spontaneously combusted like a meth lab, whether through too many volatile elements forming an indie-symphonic bomb or the sheer will of Adam Baker's maniacal, unhinged ranting. All of this-- the sonic immensity, the rural-prog classicism, the online buzz-- was enough for the hype-miners at Sony/Columbia to take notice, and before the band's bow this fall on the corporation's Canvasback boutique label, we get the B-side stopgap Frelen Mas EP.

Frelen, like its predecessor, **is a flea market's worth of loud/soft dynamics, strings, glitches, overstimulation, hollerin', and nature, scattered like buckshot off a front porch. Aside from the colonialist brass fanfare opening of "Nah Keseyi", there's not much here that doesn't follow the same shaggy, druggy template as Be He Me: the dynamic shifts and fragile psyche of The Soft Bulletin, the occasionally sublime messiness of an Appalachian Broken Social Scene. The appropriately titled, occasionally pretty "Misty Coy" is suddenly interrupted by Baker's impudent screaming, and the equally descriptively named "Such a Mess" is an admixture of rusty junkyard electronics and dark chanting that never really leaves the shed. "River Run" is a busy saloon stomper with a shouted lyric that seems to sum up the band's M.O.: "Don't you live in fear."

Emotionally, Baker still struggles with the poles of rural existence, and Frelen is shot through with the placidity/psychosis dichotomy that made Be He Me so appealing. On "Sewn to Kites" (Frelen's update of "Brother"), this happens within a single song: Tenative folk suddenly gives way to towering panic as Baker's tether to reality abandons him: "All my fishing lines/ Got cut and sewn to kites." "Ease My Mind" sees Baker organizing his surroundings into a glimmering BSS glide that, somehow logically, turns into a hoe-down. The EP-closing title track reminds us that living in the sticks can still provide simple pleasures, taking a moment to absorb the sounds of birds chirping and children playing outdoors while still allowing the countryside to create gasps of astonishment.

Nick Tosches used the "twisted roots" metaphor to connect American rural music ("a crazy bastard sort of thing") from as far back as the 17th century to what would eventually become rock'n'roll. Annuals are far from a country band in any popularly understood sense of the term, yet they seem equally cosmically attuned to their surroundings as the gentrified descendants of the wild shadowland (you can see the band's fascination with real roots on each album's art). Their cover of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" is fitting in this greater context, not for political or racial reasons as much as the song's universal appeal for transcendence from chaotic surroundings. Unlike the blog-(and-'Fork) fueled mess of praise and hype these kids had to wade through in 2006, Frelen, like its predecessor**, is how this collective sounds when struggling to make sense of its own frenzied fantasy world.