+ Sometree / Yage / Tuesday Afternoon

Date: June 2nd 2001

Location: JuZe Hammerschlag, Schorndorf (Germany)

After a week full of sunshine and warm weather, on Saturday June 2nd it was raining almost all the time (hey, if I should ever start an emo band, I guess this first sentence will be the title of the debut album). But this desolate weather couldn’t bring me in a bad mood as there was a show this evening in one of my favourite clubs. The Appleseed Cast has some stuff out on Deep Elm Records, and copies of their new album were exclusively sold on this tour while the album is available in stores around August. I liked the Appleseed Cast’s last record ‘Mare vitalis’, although it has not such a pop appeal as some of the other bands on Deep Elm just as Brandtson. But after this show I am a fan of the Appleseed Cast (if I wasn’t one before). This was the second show of this tour, and the new album of the Appleseed Cast wasn’t out yet, so I was curious how many people would show up.

 

A friend of mine who titled himself Mixmaster Bunny (sorry Tobi, just kidding, hehe) and myself arrived at the club at around 9 pm and I was surprised to see that some people had already shown up, because at first I had expected that there probably would be around ten people. But in the end about 60 people showed up. So the club was not packed, but far from being empty.

 

First band this night were Tuesday Afternoon from the eastern part of Germany, and they were playing a similar sound than most of the bands tonight, which means emotional yet not too poppy music with melodic vocals and very few noisy parts. I had not heard from this band before, so I was pretty surprised about their music. I liked it a lot, and the rest of the audience felt the same I guess. They only should improve their stage acting in the future, because apart from the singer who also played guitar the bass player and the second guitarist didn’t move at all. But this was the only point of criticism, good band!

 

Next act was another German based band called Yage. As far as I could understand they were singing in German, but their singer was mostly screaming, so I couldn’t understand a thing anyway. Their sound was more complex than that of Tuesday Afternoon, sometimes a little bit too complex for me. Don’t get me wrong, these guys handled their instruments very well and the songs were well arranged, but somehow their sound couldn’t fascinate me. But I think the majority of the audience was not of my opinion and liked them. Hey, I didn’t say that I didn’t like them, maybe I should listen to their music in my room first and then make up my mind. Anyway, the gig was okay, because there was lots of motion on stage as all members (maybe except for the drummer) were moving constantly.

 

After a short break Sometree entered the stage, and guess what... they also come from Germany. Sometree is a four piece and their singer is also playing guitar. This guy was pretty handicapped, because as he told the audience he had broken both his elbows two weeks before while playing soccer (well actually he only said that he had broken them during soccer; maybe he was the referee and got beaten up by the fans, who knows…). Medically he shouldn’t have played guitar, but hey, this is rock’n’roll! And I don’t think that his injury did affect his playing that much. Well, only when he changed his guitars in between a song, Sometree’s bass player had to help him out, but this hasn’t to do anything with playing a song, right? Sometree were more melodic than Yage, sometimes quiet tunes but also some outbursting stuff. I liked their sound, and the bass player and especially the other guitarist had a cool stage acting. The rest of the audience liked their songs as well, and so Sometree had to do an encore after their set.

 

Finally the Appleseed Cast went on stage, long after the scheduled time, but hey, this is nothing new when four bands are playing, is it? They played lots of new songs and what couldn’t convince me on ‘Mare vitalis’ completely (although I like this album!) was very different live. How can I describe this, there were lots of instrumental parts, and especially then their sound was compelling and hypnotizing in a way. You could sense this best during the last song of their regular set. This track was about 15 minutes long with lots of effects and stuff. At least the last five minutes of this song were instrumental and gradually the band left the stage. First one of the guitarists laid down his instrument, then the other guitarist (who also did the vocals), then the bass player and finally the drummer. Until the end, there were some kind of „ocean sounds“ coming from tape, and this created an atmosphere that I referred to as hypnotizing before. But the audience didn’t want to leave, everyone just kept standing there clapping their hands, so the Appleseed Cast returned for one more song. Cool show! (Stefan Münch)