Emotional little seeds

Over the course of its fairly short career, Appleseed Cast has been a musical chameleon,… Over the course of its fairly short career, Appleseed Cast has been a musical chameleon, shifting stylistic focus, in between heartbeats, from heart-wrenching emo to wand-waving experimental rock, and always squeezing room in for brooding pop songs with big ideas.

With their first two releases, The End of the Ring Wars and Mare Vitalis, Appleseed Cast placed themselves among emo’s intelligentsia, a credit to their keen ability to balance the poignantly emotional with the carefully aggressive.

After 2001’s Low Level Owl, a double album that found the band turning more synthesizer knobs than poeticizing break-ups, the Cast faced a pivotal moment in their career, in which they eventually left longtime label Deep Elm for the New York City’s Tiger Style Records.

Now touring in support of their recent Two Conversations, Appleseed Cast has slipped back into writing more conventional indie-pop songs, perhaps a product of a legion of critics pointing their fingers at the band for being a little too under the influence of Radiohead’s Kid A.

Though less prevalent, the experimentalism that manifested itself in Owl lives on in the subtle textures of Conversations. The album’s opening track, “Hello Dearest Love,” builds interlocking, sleepy guitars and clunking keys up to epic drum explosions and a complete pop-guitar onslaught. The rest of the album offers some of the more emotional lyricism that the band built its fan base on, but still, they never stray too far from their newfound love of dense production and imaginative instrumentation.

Live, one could only expect the same energetic bursts, chantable choruses and scattered musical drifts that have come to characterize Appleseed Cast’s recordings, which seem to have surfaced every year since the band’s inception. Even if their musical focus is prone to some leaning, the regularity of their ambition and artistic focus make them worth a good listen.

Apple Seed Cast and The Belles Doors will play at the Rex Theatre in the South Side at 7 p.m. tonight. Admission to the all-ages show is $10. For more information, call (412) 381-6811.