The Appleseed Cast can be a strange beast to pin down. When I first heard them on various Deep Elm Records samplers, they were obviously an emo band. Then in college, when a friend sent me “Fight Song” off of Two Conversations, I put it on my indie rock playlist in iTunes.

Then most recently, the drummer in my band referred to them as one of his favorite post rock bands. And now, as I’ve rediscovered their magnus opus, a sprawling two volume opus on three discs, I’ve found that none of those are that far off.

Low Level Owl traffics in big drums, chiming guitar arpeggios, long instrumental passages, and vocals that ride the line between singing and shouting (buried in the mix, offering further argument for those that call them a post rock band) . At times, it borrows from the less weird moments off of Sunny Day Real Estate’s LP2. At others, it forecasts the coming of groups like Explosions in the Sky and The Album Leaf. The songs range from bouncy jangle pop (“Mile Marker“) to arpeggio-heavy ambient (“Birds of Paradise“) to sprawling post rock (“View of a Burning City“) to full on hardcore inspired emo (“Blind Man’s Arrow“) and somehow still manages to fit side by side on the same disc. Or two discs, whatever.

And amazingly, not only is there not a bad song here, but there are very few that are not great. Twelve years later, these songs haven’t aged a day, even weeks after the group released a new record. And given the unusually high quality/quantity ratio here, it’s a tragedy that this record isn’t more celebrated.

Edit: admittedly, I published this before listening to the full two hours (!) of the records. This gets really weird and good toward the end–especially the closer, a glitchy drone track called “Confession“. The genre bending here goes even further than I had guessed.