As the Little Things Go – the Appleseed Cast
I’ve enjoyed The Appleseed Cast for a long time, but never managed to really get into them. Part of the problem is that I enjoyed their more direct, straightforward emo-heavy rock stuff and felt pretty distant from the more abstract post-rock, experimental stuff. In fact, I absolutely LOVED Christopher Crisci’s side project The Old Canes precisely because it stripped away all that excess sound and just offered some beautiful little folk-pop gems.
So it’s weird that their latest record Sagarmatha is easily my favorite that they’ve done, given that it contains zero songs that could reasonably be considered straight-head rock songs. I’m not quite sure I can put my finger on what it is about this album that appeals in a way that the others never quite did.
My best guess is that it feels far more restrained. Instead of straining for some kind of post-rock masterpiece, it moves at a far more leisurely pace. What’s more, it’s a question of the type of experimental sound they’ve put together. The wonderful thing about Sagarmatha is that the individual bits and pieces are thoroughly traditional. Looked at individually, they don’t seem particularly unique or intriguing. But the complexity is built through the delicate process of layering, staging, and timing.
The best song, album opener “As the Little Things Go” offers almost five full minutes of gentle ambience and dancing guitar loops to ease you gently into a world of quiet imagination, with liquid walls and flickering shapes. And when the big guitar waves finally hit, you’re ready to go wherever they may take you.
That track also exemplifies another feature of this album: the incredibly sparse use of vocals. It’s well over 6 minutes in before they show up – but I can’t say that there’s any part of this album that feels incomplete due to missing vocals. Which is weird because that’s usually the most important part of music for me, and particularly so with the other efforts from this band.
But there it is. I guess that what I really appreciate about vocals is the way they communicate the little things. The tiny differences between us. Not just through lyrics, but through the way that the voice sounds. I love songs where you can only truly understand the point because of the way the singer inhabits the words, makes them her own, lives them. Of course it’s possible to do that through any medium, but at least for me purely instrumental stuff is a lot harder to make work.
Here, though, that sense of personality is communicated another way: through ebbs and flows of sound, in the delicate attention paid to the shape of sounds. The end result is a record that moves with a smoothness and grace that defies expectation. It seldom goes big, which makes the few exceptions all the more stunning. And if there are few stand-out moments, that’s because it’s a rumination on precisely those many endless moments in between the highlights.
It’s the sound of a city after everyone is asleep. It’s a fairytale just after the final page has been read. It’s the moment when you realize that you’re dreaming but can’t quite remember what that means.