There's a certain mindset amongst the critical masses that thinks certain bands should stay within the parameters of their defined sound, never to make a puerile attempt at the pretensions of experimentation. Bands circumstantially branded with the Emo tag most often fall under this strict genre border patrol-- scan our own archives for vicious cock-punches at The Promise Ring and Milemarker when they discovered keyboards and overdubbing.
Yet somehow The Appleseed Cast, hailing from the much-mocked burg of Lawrence, Kansas, avoided a thorough Pitchfork-skewering when they released the sprawling, hyper-ambitious Low Level Owl duology two years ago. With islands of melancholy guitar-spiral songs breaking up an ocean of backward loops and intro-to-ambient instrumentals, Low Level Owl managed to be an occasionally fruitful evolution of emo's noodly side, too long by double, but digestible one disc at a time. Still, naysayers sought to whip them back into place, criticizing a presumed case of the old Radioheaditis sweeping across the world's wannabe Roger Waterses.
Unfortunately, it appears The Appleseed Cast couldn't help but take that admonishment to heart, as Two Conversations presents a band cowed and reticent, regressing to shorter songs and swearing off interlude addiction. Rather than merely dieting off the excesses and repetitions of Low Level Owl to a more manageable size, Two Conversations is a full retreat to homebase, where Mike Kinsella's American Football project looms large in influence and lyrics follow a safe diary-page path.
Even stripped largely of album-length concept (the group can't resist a couple lyric reprisals), the songs struggle to stand alone, bleeding over into each other in a way that's hypnotic at best, and soporific at worst. Slow-paced engravings of entwined guitars and atmospheric keys bookend the album, but "Hello Dearest Love" and "A Dream for Us" don't so much patiently unfold as crawl into place. Toybox reminders of the Low Level Owl sessions pop up here and there, but glockenspiels and synth strings can't hide the flimsiness of the material revealed on skeletal tracks like "The Page".
? The problem seems to be one of dynamics: whereas Low Level Owl constructed a curious alternation of pop/not-pop, Two Conversations can't get by simply on the contrast between slow/quiet and slightly-faster/loud. The more effusive tracks, like "Ice Heavy Branches" and "Innocent Vigilant Ordinary", are welcome respites from somnambulant surroundings, and they pivot well on the sporadically inventive drumming of Josh Baruth, but impassioned line readings like "we can all be naked now, and innocent" can't help but make the group sound like it's trapped on Polyvinyl Records circa 1996.
Which, not coincidentally, is the space-time location of American Football, a shadow The Appleseed Cast just can't seem to get out from under-- unless you count "The Sinking", which may well have been written right after the band attended a Pedro the Lion show. It's disheartening to see a band that was just starting to show promising signs of independent development trip back into the endless spiral of easy "sounds-like" comparisons, but that's the sad outcome when a group listens too seriously to us tuneless jackasses spinning laptop censure from our couches. Ignore all those other critics, guys, and just listen to me: an ambitious failure is better than a boring water-tread any day of the week.
