Featured Essay: The Ghost of the Appleseed Cast's Sagarmatha

by Seth Chandler

The Appleseed Cast reinvent themselves with each album, and I’m always interested to see where they’re going. I originally bought Sagarmatha on CD when it first came out, but during the pandemic I found a copy of the repress by Graveface Records at my favorite record store, The Love Garden in Lawrence, Kansas. I wasn’t expecting Sagarmatha to be the soundtrack to the haunted house I was raised in, but life is strange. The album is ambitious. It’s intoxicating, almost otherworldly. It’s been stuck in my brain since I first heard it many years ago.

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I used to sleepwalk. I’d fall asleep in the haunted basement bedroom that I shared with my older brother, but I’d wake in my sister’s room, or sometimes in my parent’s bed, feeling like I was suffocating between them and coming to gasping for air, disoriented and terrified. I wasn’t sure if I was still dreaming. I never remembered how I’d gotten there, but it felt like teleportation. I’d close my eyes in my own bed, my head safely wedged under a pillow, and awaken, confused, on the floor, or in a different bed.

I kept the pillow over my head to block out the sound of my brother’s clock radio—which he kept tuned to a local pop station that played dance hits late into the night—but also to stop me from seeing the ghost that hovered over us each night as I tried to fall asleep. My parents said I mumbled incoherently about the ghost in the basement on those nights. My sister said she’d seen the ghost, grinning like someone with a secret. It called to me, said my name once. Sometimes, I’d remember parts of the dreams that made me climb the basement steps. Those dreams had a sound, a background drone that turned into a faraway hum and crept closer.

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I was reminded of it the first time I heard Sagarmatha. It sounded familiar—hypnotic and haunting—but felt like those nightly sojourns up the basement steps: half-conscious, half-dreaming, propelled by forces beyond my control along the hallway leading to my parents’ and sister’s rooms. Chris Crisci’s whisper guides me through the moonlit hallway. His voice an echo, muffled by the misery of finding the place where ambition and regret meet, a sadness and pain fed by ruminating on the ghosts of the past and an inner voice that constantly pushes him to pursue whatever’s next.

Sagarmatha has a heaviness that is implicit in the title; “Sagarmatha” is the Nepalese name for Mt. Everest. I first heard the album shortly after reading Jon Krakauer’s incredible book Into Thin Air, which documents the tragic loss of eight lives on Everest/Sagarmatha in 1996. I don’t know why the band chose the album’s title, but I do know they’re adept at transporting the listener. Emotionally, Sagarmatha feels like the place where ambition and regret meet, a feeling not unfamiliar to those driven to keep climbing.

The song “The Road West” epitomizes this attempt to climb the mountain. It’s an epic journey that turns into an explosion, like watching a fast rolling storm blow directly over base camp after a long day’s climb. The highest place on earth is meaningful. It’s a lofty pursuit or a cautionary tale or a place haunted by the ghosts of people that almost made it to the top but couldn’t quite get there. They ran out of air or willpower or reasons to keep pushing up that fucking mountain. Do the ghosts that haunted the sacred mountain remember their own end? Would they change it if they could? Do their mournful cries echo in the winds that bite the exposed skin of climbers eking their way to the top, eager to create their own myth and carve their names into the mountain’s history?

The highlight of the album, though, is one of the early tracks, “The Summer Before.” Crisci repeats the line “all summer’s wasted on you, Arizona,” like an overzealous climber who realizes only too late that his attempt to make it to the summit of the mountain will end in his own demise and wishes to somehow summon the summer heat of the distant desert. It’s a beautiful and mournful song. That’s what this band has always done, though,masterfully and surprisingly.

On the album’s third song, “The Road West,” the band has begun its musical ascent. Beginning with a spare melody that builds to become something both propulsive and then incessant before dramatically opening up feels almost like bursting up through the cloud cover.

The Appleseed Cast have always been determined, creating music capable of transporting listeners to the icy slopes of faraway climbs and the haunted basements of childhoods long gone and nearly forgotten. Many members had come and gone from the band by this point, but their path up the mountain always remained true. Some people die doing that. Others just keep suffering in pursuit of something bigger than themselves. The songs ebb and flow, rolling in like an angry blizzard, and leaving me laid out, half-buried in snow as they crash down on my body, pinned underneath. Each song takes on a life of their own like a restless spirit passed from this world trying to find its way to the mountain’s peak.

Dropping the needle on this record always takes me back to the haunted basement like a kind of ghost that’s been following me my whole life. It calls my name, as much chasing me as it is compelling me upward. Up the stairs, up the mountain, up to the place where it’s safe to look back at how far I’ve come.

Seth plays in Lizard Brain Trust, Sweet Sweater and co-runs Dumb Ghost Records. Lizard Brain Trust is working on their second album, Civilwarland, which will be released at some point in 2025…if they can get their shit together