Simian Groove: Apes of the State return to Florida
By Shelton Hull
Monday night’s show at The Ox in Gainesville will be the 19th played by Apes of the State in their current tour, which began just two weeks ago and will last for another six weeks or so. The Lancaster, PA quartet classifies their music as “Folk Punk”, with mostly acoustic instruments and application, but with a fundamentally punkish approach to songcraft and presentation. The “Go Back To Rehab” mini-tour also features Myles Bullen, a rising young rapper from Portland, ME.
Apes of the State is built around the words and the voice of April Hartman, aka Apes, the singer/guitarist who founded the band in 2016. The group also includes co-founder Dan Ebersole on mandolin and Mollie Swartz on violin but this incarnation will reportedly feature just Hartman and Ebersole as an acoustic duo.
June 2 will mark ten years to the day that Apes left her native New York City and entered a rehab facility in Lancaster, a decision that not only saved her life, but ultimately produced a lot of excellent music. Her first album, All I Did This Summer Was Go to Rehab, was released the following year. It was the first of at least four studio albums, in addition to several EPs and split-singles, all of which was released independently, which suits their DIY ethos just fine. You can see those values reflected in every aspect of their game, from aesthetics to logistics. When possible, they prefer to play all-ages shows. Ticket prices are, if not free, kept low enough to be accessible to pretty much anyone. If you’re broke, they’ll probably let you in anyway.
The current tour of Florida is their fourth, and it makes perfect sense that their sound would resonate most strongly in a place like Gainesville, where the artists have very similar influences and attitudes, and where women have long been predominant in the music scene. “We toured Florida in 2019 twice,” she says, “once with Local News Legend and then again with the full acoustic Apes band in December right after we released Pipe Dream. We have always had a great time playing down in FL! It’s definitely a commitment when it comes to touring. Because of the shape, it’s hard to just hit one Florida show and then leave. You gotta drive all the way down the peninsula and then out, so it makes much more sense to hang a few days and do a couple of shows, which is what we have always done.”
All of their songs ring through with an unmistakable sincerity–no put-on, no artifice. They probably couldn’t do it if they wanted to, and they don’t want to. My favorite is “Internet Song”, which finds Apes singing from the rare position of an elder, talking about a world that no longer exists. “I actually kinda sat down to write a sad/nostalgic song about growing up before the internet and cell phones and how we would walk around the neighborhood and knock on our friends’ doors to ask them to come play,” she says. “It ended up turning into a more goofy song that probably has some heavy Blink 182 inspiration since they were who I was listening to back when I was a kid roaming the neighborhood setting things on fire.” She notes also that “the inspiration to add that ridiculous electric guitar solo in an otherwise completely acoustic song came from the song ‘That One Limp Bizkit Song’ by Sledding with Tigers.”
When they’re not on the road, band members work a variety of regular jobs, as do most working musicians. “I (Apes) run a dog sitting / training / walking business that I operate in between tours,” she says. “The rest of us do gig work and run our own small businesses which enables us to make our own schedules for touring.”
Hartman and Ebersole also run a foundation called Second Chance to Play, which they founded to help support their colleagues in the Lancaster scene. Like so many musicians around the country (and we here in Florida know this as well as anyone, unfortunately, they have seen drugs claim the lives of so many great talents, and they’re doing what they can to help. Those values are reflected in the current tour, which is sponsored by a variety of charitable groups like Maine Inside Out, Music To Life, and the Health Policy Network. They’ll also be providing private speaking and performance programs to 10 recovery programs along the tour route.
The Gainesville gig follows shows at Moseys in Panama City on the 28th, Sarbez in St. Augustine on the 29th, Hooch and Hive in Tampa on March 1, and Stardust Video in Orlando on the 2nd. After a show in Charlotte on the 4th, they’ll start working their way back home, playing around the northeast through April before spending the month of May on their very first European tour, with 19 shows already booked in six countries, including a six-night run through the UK that should prove crucial to their global outreach efforts. Those cities will absolutely love what they’re doing, which is great, because they plan to continue doing it for a long time.
Each year, the balance of time spent on vs off-road tilts more toward the muse, and the machine of capitalism is bending slowly, but surely to her will. The authenticity of their work compels further study, and the objective view looks fantastic. They started from the bottom, now they’re here, wherever “here” happens to be at any given moment.
