Annabel – Each And Everyone – Review
Posted by Staff on April 28, 2009 – 12:31 pm -
Release Date: April 28th, 2009
Record Label: Count Your Lucky Stars Records
Genre: Indie Pop
Effort is an operative word for this writer. Very rarely does a record produced with an enormous amount of labor and purpose – Green Day’s American Idiot serves as an exemplary exception – make me want to listen more than once. Call me Thoreau: I am a man of simplicity; I am a three-chord, verse/chorus/bridge/chorus man; I honed my ears on Blink 182’s Cheshire Cat and Less Than Jake’s Losing Streak. “Production value”, to me, is an oxymoron. So when I accessed the MySpace profile of Kent, Ohio indie/pop/experimental band Annabel, I was stoked to read the tagline plastered adjacent to the cover photo of their most recent album release, Each and Everyone (sic): “Try hard, fucking idiots!” More than minimalism, I am a fan of irony.
Andy, Ben, and Scotty have been established – evidenced only by their profile’s “member since” date – as a band for at least four years, and that duration is exemplified in their united sound. From the top to the bottom of the page’s playlist and across the breadth of the band, continuity is pervasive, and the linkage is achieved by a simple rock n’ roll truth: Drumming. From clicking rimshots to floor tom rolls to more experimental percussion – harmonic bells escape from beneath distorted guitar and pounding bass on “Sleeping Lions” – the man behind the kit is the heart of Annabel.
A simple statement suffices: The strongest track is undoubtedly “You Started Thinking Again…”. The album’s acme piles vocals in rhyming couplets on top of one another – “Fly away from all this lust/We’ll fly until we find our next/We’ll be forgotten someday soon/But until then we’ll try again” – and anchors itself on a surf-y guitar riff. Married to the aforementioned drumming, the track could be the future homecoming king/big-man-on-campus lovechild of Weezer and Silversun Pickups.
This writer is hopeful: He is hopeful that Annabel keeps making music. He is hopeful that the boys from Kent, Ohio apply the tradition of their hometown – arguably the national epicenter of university demonstration – to continue revolutionizing their sound while holding steady to what Annabel is on this album. This writer is hopeful for what Annabel will be tomorrow, the next day, and Each and Everyone (sic) to follow. ~Erik Paul Schwab
Score: 4.25/5
Track Listing:
1. Sleeping Lions
2. People and Places
3. Castles in the Air
4. Bouquet Mines
5. As It Happened
6. In Droves
7. Adventures…
8. Parade Rest
9. You Started Thinking Again, Didn’t You?
10. Widow Party
11. (As Yet) Untold Stories
You must be logged in to post a comment.