Standing outside Neumos Tuesday night after the Annuals show, I heard a woman say, “Only young people could put on a show like that.” Of the six persons onstage for Annuals’ set, not one was older than 22, and one of them, a little blond multi-instrumentalist, looked like he could have been 15. The rest of this review might have been about a promising young band that sometimes sounds like Broken Social Scene, if it weren’t for the fact that bandleader Adam Baker is a complete spaz. His relentless energy was sometimes infectious but mostly off-putting and just plain strange. Half the show his tongue was hanging out of his mouth as he jumped up and down, banging on keyboards, yelling into the mic and smiling ecstatically at the ceiling. I wanted to feed off of the energy (others in the crowd had no problem doing so), but I wasn’t even close feeling it. His over-enthusiastic vocals at times recalled those terrible adolescent emo bands that dominate the pop charts these days. (Imagine the Dashboard Confessional guy with a beard, on acid.) Otherwise, the band’s compositions were huge, living things, overcrowded with textures and the occasionally brilliant musical idea. A third of the songs featured drum breakdowns with two to five of the band members all banging away simultaneously. I’m not usually a fan of drum circles at an indie rock show, but the drum breaks were a welcome reprieve from the rest of the set, which, despite the overwhelming evidence of talent and potential in the young rockers, was surprisingly boring.

However: Annuals is definitely a band to watch for in the coming years. Their debut record (Be He Me) is much better than their live show, and perhaps my distaste for spazzy emo singers clouded my perception of their performance—which definitely shouldn’t be classified as emo, and definitely should be classified as spazzy.