‘90s emo rockers keep it steady and solid

Though The Appleseed Cast have come a long way since the 1990s emo of their debut, their seventh album “Sagarmatha” shows that they might have become a bit too comfortable with the cerebral post-rock of the 21st century.

Without a doubt, the album is impeccably performed and delicately crafted, but The Cast seldom stray from the well-trodden path of their peers and predecessors.

That’s not to say that the album isn’t ambitious. The layers of reverberating guitar and keyboard melodies that make up the bulk of the album’s nine songs might offer little in the way of new-ness, but the band’s skill at constructing an album so dynamically complex shows a musical ability just as refined and compelling as any of their contemporaries.

Though Chris Crisci’s delay-drenched singing is often the focus, the album is split evenly between vocal and instrumental material.

These two sides of the band play well off each other, especially in album opener “As the Little Things Go,” where Crisci’s voice enters at the climax of an instrumental build, adding just the right amount of waves to a sea already churning with crashing cymbals and sprawling guitar.

Yet it’s on the instrumental material that The Appleseed Cast get a chance to step outside the box. Songs like “One Reminder, An Empty Room” and “Like a Locus (Shake Hands with the Dead)” show the band exploring a more ambient approach, while the latter even shows them drawing heavily from electronic music.

It might not blow the doors off modern rock music, but that certainly doesn’t seem like what the band was trying to achieve with “Sagarmatha.”

Rather, The Appleseed Cast have made an album worthy of post-rock’s already crowded canon and a name for themselves as one of the genre’s most reliable bands.