Appleseed Cast, based in Kansas, was an emo-core band that played
lushly noisy,
oddly melodic and painfully personal music.
Chris Crisci (vocals), Aaron Pillar (guitar), Louie Ruiz (drums) and Jason Wickersheim (bass, saxophone, piano) formed the band in the second half of the 1990s.
The End of The Ring Wars (Deep Elm, 1998) was a formative work of great
promise, as the singer took front stage with his
mournful, soul-baring, cathartic stories, while the instrumentalists displayed a knack
for crafting atmospheric soundscapes and integrating saxophone and piano in
rock's arsenal.
The dissonant and poignant catchy punk-pop of opener Marigold & Patchwork is misleading because most of the album is much more ferocious: the vocalist
screams over the anthemic guitar noise of Antihero and his
vocals are buried under a volcanic eruption of guitar noise in The Last Ring.
Moment #72 opens with a scorching guitar distortion but then it settles into a calmer punk-pop mood.
A peak of pathos is reached in the mood swings of Portrait.
Standout Stars even boasts a romantic saxophone (played by Jason Wickersheim) which pushes it into hypnotic Robert Wyatt territory.
The overall effect was that of a heavier, sadder Sunny Day Real Estate.
Unfortunately, half of the songs are underwhelming, either too amateurish or poorly developed.
It would have been a masterpiece EP without the fodder.
New drummer Josh Baruth joined the band for the single Skatter Ik Ignito.
Their second album,
Mare Vitalis (sep 1999 - feb 2000),
, assimilated the
instrumental lesson of Built To Spill and the oneiric
quality of dream-pop, while keeping the vocals centerstage.
They largely abandoned guitar noise in favor of a broader palette of rhythm,
from the
martial slo-core of The Immortal Soul of Mundo Cani to the
square dance that opens Fishing The Sky.
They were trying a bit too hard to sound poppy in Forever Longing The Golden Sunsets, Santa Maria and Poseidon, succeeding only with the
Nirvana-esque grunge of And Nothing Less.
The convoluted roots-rock of Secret and the
brainy instrumental Mare Mortis show a
post-rock temptation that fully blossoms in
the seven-minute Storms, an extended song that grafts
emocore onto a trunk of post-rock.
Appleseed Cast continued their evolution by recording two ambitious albums,
each a mixture of instrumentals and songs. The compositions are lengthy and
the arrangements more sophisticated, employing psychedelic drones, sound effects and tape loops.
Low Level Owl - Volume 1 (Deep Elm, 2001) opens with the
Jeff Pearce-esque overture The Waking Of Pertelotte. This is but one of the creative instrumentals, followed by the
noisy vignette Flowers Falling From Dying Hands, by
the mechanical carillon of Bird Of Paradise
and by
the surrealistic
Doors Lead To Questions
(disorderly and bombastic drumming coupled with majestic organ drones).
It's an album of
improbable syntheses.
The hypnotic chanting and strumming of On Reflection blends minimalism, The Who and emocore.
The poppy ballad Steps And Numbers
is planted into Sonic Youth-esque guitarwork
and has a
prominent Procol Harum-esque organ in the coda.
Mile Marker is a
postmodernist take on the singalongs of the psychedelic era.
Even simpler songs like the
dreaming and melodramatic Blind Man's Arrow and the
Buddhist-inspired organ prayer Convict conceal a complex nature.
The eight-minute instrumental closer View Of A Burning City veers completely off route, transitioning from musique concrete to heroic minimalism.
Low Level Owl - Volume 2 (Deep Elm, 2001) boasts a
"cleaner" sound and simpler structures, but also more instrumental experiments.
They concoct
straightforward pop tunes such as A Place In Line (with echoes of the Who's Tommy) and indulge in
the melodic repetition of the seven-minute Rooms And Gardens.
The one song that stands out is actually
Strings, a deconstructed folk tune that starts out
like Simon & Garfunkel rehearsing in a closet,
then transforms into a
Pink Floyd-ian crescendo and then
mutates a third time into a harmless lullaby.
However, at the core, this is an instrumental album, an album of
intriguing and bizarre instrumentals.
If Ring Out The Warning Bell is just a cold post-rock repetition of patterns,
and The Argument is a bombastic soundscape for an anthem that never materializes,
Sunset Drama King is
the kind of romantic fantasia that most post-rock bands cannot forge,
and the album ends with the
sensational nine-minute electronic collage Confession which has nothing
in common with emocore nor post-rock but proves that someone in this rock band
embraced the wrong career.
The two albums were later collected on the triple-LP
Low Level Owl I & II (Gilead, 2006).
Chris Crisci and Aaron Pillar launched a side-project,
Hundred Hands, whose debut EP, Little Eyes (Deep Elm, 2001),
could be appended to the Low Level Owl albums. The six songs are
formally even more to the point. The main difference is that here the
guitar is centerstage.
Lost Songs (Deep Elm, 2002) collects unreleased material.
Appleseed Cast's
Two Conversations (Tiger Style, 2003) is a much more accessible
shoegaze/slocore effort.
Peregrine (Militia Group, 2006) was a concept album that only
lacked the emo-grade intensity of their beginnings while creating little
of substance in the sonic department.
Sagarmatha (Militia Group, 2009) is full of instrumentals that prove their post-rock credentials.
Illumination Ritual (2013) is pleasant post-rock but not particularly
interesting.
After a six-year hiatus, they returned with
The Fleeting Light Of Impermanence (2019)
