Brightest Young Things

all photos: Brandon Hirsch
all words: Phil Cohen

In 2002, I downloaded an MP3 of the Appleseed Cast’s “Steps and Numbers” off of Kazaa and then, immediately after, sought out the rest of the album it comes from, Low Level Owl; I have let the band and their blend of 90’s Midwestern emo, prog and post-rock determine pretty much every band I have liked or disliked since then. That the band was in town yesterday, playing that seminal double album straight through would have had 15-year old me doubled over with joy. However, the more I think about it, I would have rather the band picked the 10 or 15 strongest songs from across their career and played them instead.

Just because an album’s good doesn’t mean it’s the best thing for a band to perform live at the expense of the rest of their output. Worse still, the mathematics of double albums is unfuckwithable: with 24 songs, some are bound to be filler. Translate that entire record to a stage, and you have a set filled with some dull low points mixed in with the truly transcendental. That was more or less what transpired last night.

Openers Dreamend sound exactly like a band that would open for the Appleseed Cast and by that, I mean only that they traffic in the same dreamy, melancholic shoegaze as their tour- and label-mates. I often have a hard time telling the difference between what’s good and what’s bad when music is skull-crushingly loud enough and considering I couldn’t even hear myself think by the end of their set, Dreamend gets a pass. Good work!

I think the problem I have with a set consisting entirely of Low Level Owl is that it’s famous for balancing the slow-burning epics Appleseed Cast have become known for with what at the time seemed like a number of genre-defying ambient and experimental vignettes. However, the shorter pieces were played from a laptop, pre-recorded, while the band used the time to tune and breathe and the classics were spread way too generously throughout the set. Part I is a behemoth, cut after cut after cut, ending with the explosive and abrasive “View of a Burning City.”

After immediately stopping that track about eight minutes in, the band ran off stage to go to the bathroom and smoke a cigarette. All grievances with cutting off a rock show halfway through for an intermission aside, I knew the second half wasn’t going to be nearly as strong considering that half of the record suffers from an identity crisis, frontman Christopher Crisci having shoved all the weird little numbers he couldn’t fit elsewhere on the album towards the end. While songs like “Rooms and Gardens” and “The Argument” took off, too much of the second half merely passed the audience by and their exhaustion at the end of the two-hour set was palpable, myself included.

That being said, I understand the motivation. The band has no new album to support and shrewdly predicted they could sell way more tickets by playing through an album that many think has yet to be surpassed by their later work (and they did: the show was sold out days in advance). But, when it comes down to it, the real highlights were the longer songs from Part I that they probably would have played on a regular tour anyway. Do I wish we’d gotten “Ceremony,” “Fight Song” and “As The Little Things Go”? Yeah. Do I think, even as one of the band’s biggest fans, that songs like “A Place In Line” start to sound like every other Appleseed Cast song after a night full of them? Yeah. But I’m not about to complain about one of my favorite bands selling out a show and letting me see them for the fourth time in four years (yeah!).

Previously in Live DC:

• 5/22: LiveDC: Spirit Animal @ Red Palace
• 5/22: LiveDC: Astra Via @ Black Cat
• 5/22: LiveDC: Father John Misty @ Rock & Roll Hotel
• 5/22: LiveDC: Drive-By Truckers and Lucinda Williams @ Merriweather
• 5/22: Photos: Summer Camp takes the "Ladies of Town" Drag Show
• 5/22: LiveDC: Penguin Prison & Class Actress @ RNR Hotel
• 5/21: LiveDC: James Morrison @ 930 Club
• 5/21: Photos: Que Sera L'Anniversaire @ Napoleon
• 5/21: LiveDC: La Sera/ Beach Week @ Red Palace
• 5/21: LiveDC: The Black Keys & Arctic Monkeys @ Merriweather Post Pavilion