If I seem to be contradicting myself across the different narratives I tell about how I got into the Appleseed Cast, it’s because my relationship with the band is a little contradictory. We had many passings with one another before I finally fell in love with the project, and each of those feel like a fitting introduction for a story about how someone fell in love with one of their favorite bands.
But perhaps the most impressing of those introductions was the track “Fight Song,” a driving, passionate lament that cut me to the core when I first heard it. I was already familiar with the group after hearing them on a few Deep Elm compilations, but I had never dug further. “Fight Song” convinced me that they were a band that was worth the attention.
Unfortunately, it came at a time when I was setting aside the emo/punk/hardcore scene as a whole and branching out into other genres, and so I missed it at the time. Luckily, there’s always still time.
Whenever a new technology makes its way into music—such as autotune, synthesizers, samplers, or drum machines—it’s often accompanied by a chorus of naysayers saying things like, “you’d never see a REAL musician like Jimi Hendrix using that crap.”
Few members of the music scene are as prolific as Justin Broadrick. Since the first Jesu release in 2004, he has had more than twenty releases through that project, including a number of studio albums, EPs, splits, and collaborative albums.