By Jacob NelsonThe Daily Northwestern

Last Thursday night I saw and spoke to two bands – one of which has played with The Flaming Lips, the other with gorillas.

North Carolina bands Annuals and The Never performed a sold out show at Schuba’s on Feb. 22. Annuals, who recently endured the immense anxiety that comes with performing on television when they played on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” were indifferent to the sold out crowd. At the rate they’re going, they can afford to be.

None of the six members of Annuals are older than 22. Yet, the band has already played with a barrage of popular acts like The Flaming Lips, Tapes ‘n Tapes, and The Dears. They’ve also been asked to play at prestigious music festivals like this year’s Bonnaroo in Tennessee and have been written up in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Spin.

“It’s all gradual,” Annuals’ singer, guitarist and keyboardist Adam Baker said of the band’s increasing success.

The band’s debut album, Be He Me, combines electronic elements influenced by Radiohead and Aphex Twin with catchy pop hooks reminiscent of Paul Simon and Brian Wilson. Whether or not these elements were combined on purpose is another matter entirely.

“We weren’t trying to do much but make good music that sounded good to us,” Baker says of the style the band pursued on the album, which was released on Ace Fu Records in October 2006.

The band attributes part of its success to their excessive touring, which began with the release of their album and, besides a one-month break, has not stopped since. Though this strategy has helped the band attain some level of success as musicians, it has also left them physically exhausted.

“It doesn’t seem like it should be work, but doing it all the f—— time, it sort of is,” Baker explained in between cigarette drags. “We try not to take it for granted – we appreciate every bit of it, because otherwise we’d have real jobs.”

“I’m f—— exhausted,” guitarist Kenny Florence added.

But the band explained the additional work that has gone into recording their second album during tour breaks. They also pointed out that physical fatigue has not yet seeped into their mental condition.

“I’m trying to make all the right turns to make it last as long as it can,” said bassist Mike Robinson. “The shoe can fall at any moment; we kind of live with that mentality.”

Watching Annuals play, it’s not hard to see why they’re exhausted. Often, at least two of the band’s six members are playing a drum of some sort. At one point four members were either playing on one of the two drum sets onstage or simply pounding nearby toms. Baker kept a slide whistle and a half-dozen drumsticks in his pockets for the set. In short, Annuals goes all out.

At times, Baker sounds reminiscent of Conor Oberst, before Oberst made a conscious decision to be a folk-pop star. His ability to be both passionate and melodic simultaneously transcends the barrage of sound coming from each of Annuals’ members from chaos to harmony. When the band finished, it was as if the audience had absorbed the band’s energy – Annuals was exhausted, but we were pumped.

“I would say this is the first where it’s like, ‘Okay, this is working,'” said The Never singer and guitarist Noah Smith. I went backstage before the show to speak to Smith along with brothers Jonny and Joah Tunnell, The Never’s drummer and bassist. We sat on couches in a small, white-concrete walled room and spoke as the band’s members cracked opened bottles of beer.

Jonny explained that he and his brother met Smith and Smith’s friend Ari Picker when the two moved to Chapel Hill, where Smith lived. Though Smith, Picker and the Tunnell brothers both had their own bands, the four often found themselves playing in front of bonfires together. When both of their bands broke up, the four of them created The Never.

“It kind of formed like Voltron, as they say,” Jonny explained. Jonny begins telling me about band’s first album, Antarctica, when they realize they need to do a soundcheck.

The Never sounds a lot like Weezer, if you replaced the meaningless pop lyrics of their later albums with lyrics that both tell fairy tales and of emotional turmoil. The similarity in catchiness, however, is uncanny. Both bands utilize power chords and a rare but melodic coordination of front and back-up vocals to make ultra-poppy, yet undeniably substantial, songs (at least pre