The Appleseed Cast at the Biltmore Cabaret

I’ve been a fan of The Appleseed Cast for a number of years now. Originally calling Lawrence, Kansas home, they passed through Iowa City a number of times during my days there.

So when they came through Vancouver and played the Biltmore Cabaret on March 9th, I took the opportunity to shoot some of their performance as they passed through town.

I processed all of these in black and white for a couple of reasons. First, the Biltmore, even though a great venue for music acts like this, is dark and has a low ceiling. On top of that, the lighting was low and green for the entire duration of the show. That pretty much makes every single photo make each person look green from head to toe.

The black and white seems to bring out the initmacy of the venue as well as the performance. This show is on their Low Level Owl Tour, playing the entirety of two early albums, Low Level Owl, Vol. 1 and Low Level Owl, Vol. 2.

In all honesty, these are two albums that I have the least amount of familiarity with, but I ran into a co-worker at the show who is an even bigger fan of the guys. He told me that this was a brilliantly spot on performance of two classic albums for The Appleseed Cast fans.

The Appleseed Cast has been around for what seems like forever.

I remember first playing some of their early music during my days at KRUI. When you’re turning around and looking at the wall of CD’s that we used to have laid out on custom built shelving out of mere 2X4’s, these guys were easy to spot in the A’s when that track only has about 30 seconds left until it’s over and you don’t have anything else queued up to play next.

In the midst of those mad scrambles, you had a 50/50 shot that what you were about to put on the air was going to suck or be something good. These were one of the things where I lucked out, which was more often the case during my time there.

I have a certain weak spot for melodic, spacey arrangements with complementary lyrics thrown on top of the music that only adds to the atmosphere rather than be the forefront of a song.

That pretty much sums up The Appleseed Cast’s catalog, and this performance maintains that opinion for me.