The Apples In Stereo: Electronic Projects For Musicians

THE APPLES IN STEREO: ELECTRONIC PROJECTS FOR MUSICIANS (1995-2008; 2008)

1) Shine (In Your Mind); 2) Thank You Very Much; 3) Onto Something; 4) Man You Gotta Get Up; 5) The Golden Flower; 6) Avril En Mai; 7) Hold On To This Day; 8) The Oasis; 9) On Your Own; 10) Other; 11) So Far Away; 12) The Apples Theme Song; 13) Stephen Stephen; 14) Dreams.

This, however, is an entirely different matter. Even more than Science Faire, this is a typical col­lection of «odds and sods» — bonus tracks from Japanese editions, promos, B-sides, soundtracks, etc. — but the major advantage is that all of these songs were recorded already after The Apples In Stereo started to «click» as a real band with a voice of its own, and so, Electronic Projects For Musicians (a name that, out of all cheerful pop outfit leaders, only Schneider could have come up with) is a credible addition to any fan collection.

Frankly speaking, though, any fan would do better to take the album apart, throw out the 1/3 or so ridiculous filler, and distribute the rest of the tracks as bonuses to their respective LPs: any collec­tion like this is an insult to the art of coherence. The first two tracks are sufficient proof. 'Shine (In Your Mind)' is a gorgeous psycho-rocker that has a better chance of making you see the stars than almost anything on Fun Trick Noisemaker — polyphonic harmonies, chimes, acid slide guitar, the works. So what can be more awesome than following it up with one minute of than­king their Japanese fans for buying their records, backed by a piano lesson for a three-year old?

Additional embarrassments include 'The Apples Theme Song', said to be the introductory song for the band's official website — sufficient pretext, I believe, to justify a strict boycott. At least 'The Monkees Theme' was, like, a real song; this particular jingle is not even funny. And if 'Ste­phen Stephen', an ode to Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report, is to be understood as an at­tempt on Schneider's part to one-up Brian Wilson and his 'Johnny Carson'... well, the attempt is botched, to say the least. A big part of the problem is that The Apples In Stereo are sort of... unfunny. The­re are many things to like about Schneider — but not his sense of humor. (That's what you get, probably, for spending the first six years of your life in Cape Town).

As for the actual songs, well, for the most part, they agree in quality with the time periods in which they were recorded. Tone Soul Evolution add-ons are trippy-pretty, but forgettable; Dis­co­very Of A World outtakes are a couple of attractive ballads, particularly the freak-folkish ' Oa­sis'; the Velocity Of Sound outtake is predictably overloud and ugly; and 'So Far Away' is an at­tempt at an anthemic psycho-drone that is interesting — some will inarguably find the marriage of its guitar jangle with a cute pastoral phrase played over and over on a recorder (I think?) trance inducing, although I just go for «atmospheric».

There may be no great shakes on here, but the same could, with occasional reservations, be said about the Apples' career in general. No problem issuing a thumbs up here — beware, though, lest you actually mistake this for a serious LP of new material or something, particularly since the title is so utterly misleading.

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The Apples In Stereo: Science Faire

THE APPLES IN STEREO: SCIENCE FAIRE (1993-1995; 1996)

1) Tidal Wave; 2) Motorcar; 3) Turncoat Indian; 4) Haley; 5) Not The Same; 6) Stop Along The Way; 7) Running In Circles; 8) Hypnotic Suggestion; 9) Touch The Water; 10) Glowworm; 11) To Love The Vibration Of The Bulb; 12) Time For Bed/I Know You'll Do Well; 13) Rocket Pad.

Prior to firmly proving their worthiness with Fun Trick Noisemaker, the Apples (not yet In Ste­reo) entered the market with two EPs, Tidal Wave (1993) and Hypnotic Suggestion (1994), nei­ther of which caused any big fuss. Two years later, out of an obsessive impulse to tidy up (I can relate), they re-released both on one CD, adding three more rarities from various sources to com­plete the picture. The result is Science Faire, an informative, but otherwise useless memento of the band's early days that I mention and discuss out of principle rather than admiration.

If, like mine, your main problem with Fun Trick Noisemaker was the lack of emotion-brewing hooks behind the thick, juicy, happy «applish» guitar sound of the songs, then on these early EPs the problem is squared: the hooks are just as lacking, but the sound is disappointing as well. Not a single whiff of sweet psychedelia, apart from maybe a small bunch of «woman-tone»-based solos; it's all generic distorted indie rock, grovelling before the D.I.Y. altar — and what has that to do with the Apples' consummate professionalism, the only real reason to listen to them?

It is a good thing they only re-recorded two of these songs for the LP, because if all of the songs sounded like tin can demo versions, even the hardcore Apples fan would have to feel cheated. As it is, you can at least concentrate on the modestly interesting process of watching the band grow and mature, from the very lumpy, crude brute-riffs of Tidal Wave to the slightly more exquisite melody shaping and sci-fi touches on Hypnotic Suggestion. The previously unreleased instru­mental 'To Love The Vibration Of The Bulb' is even more interesting — imagine a garage band's first (failed) take on 'King Of The Mountain Hall' or 'Astronomy Domine' with a chunk of 'Misir­lou' inside: I mean, even spirits and aliens must enjoy surfing, mustn't they? And then, finally, one big slab of full-blown psychedelia on the two-part 'Time For Bed', which sounds exactly like one of those lovely multi-part McCartney kiddie-psycho-suites circa 1973, except without even a tenth part of McCartney's musical genius. Never mind, they were still learning.

Without trying to concentrate on the spot-the-changes year-by-year game, though, Science Faire is plain old boring. Maybe the EPs needed more input from original bassist Jim McIntyre, whose 'Touch The Water' is the lightest bit of nostalgic psycho-folk on the album, going easier on the sludge than most other songs (McIntyre is also credited for 'Vibration Of The Bulb'; he split be­fore the band started making it big in order to rule over his own, much less famous, Elephant 6 project Von Hemmling). Or, perhaps, not. But at least it is nice to know that The Apples In Stereo have always been «shiny happy people», even if it took them some time to realize that, if you really want to come across as shiny and happy, it doesn't help much if you borrow your guitars from the Meat Puppets. Thumbs down.

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The Apples In Stereo: Travellers In Space And Time

THE APPLES IN STEREO: TRAVELLERS IN SPACE AND TIME (2010)

1) The Code; 2) Dream About The Future; 3) Hey Elevator; 4) Strange Solar System; 5) Dance Floor; 6) C.P.U.; 7) No One In The World; 8) Dignified Dignitary; 9) No Vacation; 10) Told You Once; 11) It's All Right; 12) Next Year At About The Same Time; 13) Floating In Space; 14) Nobody But You; 15) Wings Away; 16) Time Pilot.

Three years and a couple of new band members later, the transformation into Xanadu-era ELO is finally complete. If, in the late Seventies, or from a late Seventies perspective, you hated Jeff Lyn­ne for selling out the idea of «Beatles on strings», chances are you will also hate Robert Schne­ider for selling out the idea of Jeff Lynne selling out the idea of «Beatles on strings» — at least, that's the first meta-critical idea that staggers inside the critical head.

It is also, I think, a downright wrong idea. I am a stark supporter of ELO through all the ages (ex­cluding the self-castrated Part II era), and even then, have to take a deep breath before introdu­cing anyone to the guilty pleasures of 'Sweet Talking Woman' — because, in those few nervous seconds it takes people to tell this kind of music from the Bay City Rollers, my life and reputation may be in serious danger. With Travellers In Space And Time, there is no such fear. It is clearly a record that has been recorded in our space and time, and the first reaction of people submitted to Schneider's newest experiment will be amusement rather than indignation.

Amusement, that is, at how niftily he borrows all the starry-eyed elements of that epoch's «sci-fi pop» — the synthesizer bleeps, the electronically encoded vocals, the sub-moronic disco rhythms, the nagging, repetitive hooks, the irritating naïve sentimentality, the disproportionate bombast — and converts them into a hilariously post-modernistic format, in which a «hook» ceases to be a magnet for your emotions and becomes a ridiculously absolute triumph of empty form.

"Before we begin our lessons, I would like to speak to you briefly on what you should know abo­ut how to learn the code", someone tells us a few seconds before we begin hearing the music. No question about it: The Apples have definitely mastered "The Code", whatever it is. Of the twelve or so fully fledged songs on the album, I count zero as «filler». Schneider's pop structures have reached their zenith, not least because he is now concentrating only on the things he does best: rhythmic, relatively fast-moving pop-rockers with complex vocal harmonies. No noise, no non­sense, and no languid folk balladry. Nothing in which soul has to be an essential component.

This is not to be taken as a complaint. Singing these here songs with soul could only have spoilt them — could only make people turn away from them as they were liable to turn away from ELO records, because Jeff Lynne, the old bastard, seemed to be trying to convince you that his silly odes to imaginary worlds and idealized females, like, had meaning. What does Schneider say, though? "Elevator, take me straight to your bed, when I look around, it distracts me", he tells us, in one of the album's most memorable killer hooks. Not really a Lynn line, if you ask me, altho­ugh the melody, sure as hell, could have been written by ELO; yet they would neither arrange it nor sing it quite that way.

If it looks like I'm talking bullshit, we can always go another way: for instance, say that the gene­ral message of Travellers In Space And Time is that there is no message, or, at least, you can never figure out the message because things keep changing back and forth, sort of like the App­les' own musical predilections. The album's first single, "Dance Floor", sort of implies that ("The dance floor isn't there no more, but my body's still movin' / Tell me, do you know, where are we to go, when our world is so confusing?"), plus, it provides Schneider with a great excuse to shake his big bulk and wave his professorial beard before the mike in the song's video, like a neighbor­hood karaoke bar impersonator of Barry Gibb — this kind of nihilistic musical philosophy is pro­bably the only way to let the man get away with embarrassments like these. (For the record, Eli­jah Baggins is in the video because the band is actually signed to his label, so I guess if he ain't able to make money on them, at least they're a good sport to hang around while goofing off).

Altogether, this is a derivative, absurd, and ultra-rationally hyper-irrational album. Highlights in­clude everything — every song has an attractive structure, although my current favourites are probably the ones that seem like they've been stolen directly out of the wastebaskets of Jeff Lyn­ne ('Nobody But You', beginning like a clone of 'Showdown' and then piling up the cellos and sweet background vocals with such faithfulness they almost seem to be inviting a lawsuit) and Roy Wood ('No Vacation', which sounds like some old Wizzard tune I forgot the name of).

With Schneider's concept of total relativity afloat all of the time, the whole thing is frustratingly water­proof: what good is there to complain that 'No One In The World' is musically simplistic and lyrically primitive? It states its point, doesn't it? It simply got itself allocated its own stance in space and time. Actually, the album does offer the best two lines of text in the Apples' entire his­tory: "You know you feel blue / When you're out of sync with your CPU", Schneider tells us among a sea of melodic bleeps and beeps (quite Pythagorean in scale, I'd say) on 'CPU', the al­bum's least retro-ish track (or, perhaps, most retro-ish, if you trace its origins to the likes of the Silver Apples and USA and their electronic hooliganry).

The only downside is that, as it still happens with the Apples even after all this time, lack of ho­nest emotionality undermines both memorability and attractive force: once the album is over for the fifth time or so, I still do not find myself remembering most songs, or, which is even worse, feeling a strong desire to return to the ones I do remember (like 'Hey Elevator' or the ridiculously outer-space-cheerful 'Told You Once'). Maybe, when all has been said and done and then re-said and re-done again, pot-bellied, bald, and bearded nerd intellectuals should still stick to advanced Linux programming, and leave pop music to young street trash. Or maybe I'm just spewing filthy discriminationalist talk here, but at least don't blame me before you've watched the 'Dance Floor' video on your own. Thumbs up, though, regardless of any worries.

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The Apples In Stereo: New Magnetic Wonder

THE APPLES IN STEREO: NEW MAGNETIC WONDER (2007)

1) Can You Feel It?; 2) Skyway; 3) Mellotron 1; 4) Energy; 5) Same Old Drag; 6) Joanie Don't U Worry; 7) Sunndal Song; 8) Droplet; 9) Play Tough; 10) Sun Is Out; 11) Non-Pythagorean Composition 1; 12) Hello Lola; 13) 7 Stars; 14) Mellotron 2; 15) Sunday Sounds; 16) Open Eyes; 17) Crimson; 18) Pre-Crimson; 19) Vocoder Ba Ba; 20) Radia­tion; 21) Beautiful Machine Parts 1-2; 22) Beautiful Machine Parts 3-4; 23) My Pretend; 24) Non-Pythagorean Com­position 3.

After the embarrassing failure of Velocity Of Sound, the Apples promptly disappeared from the studio for about four years, only serving to further confirm how much of an embarrassing failure that album really was. In the interim, Schneider diverted himself by applying his immense mathe­matical skills to the creation of a brand new «Non-Pythagorean» musical scale based on natural logarithms, resulting in a whoppin' eighty seconds of truly revolutionary keyboard tones demon­strated on the album under review (apparently, this should mean that Pythagoras is not in any im­mediate danger); and Hilarie Sydney, the band's second biggest talent that was never given a pro­per chance to become its first, finally decided that to bear the tyranny of a bald man in glasses is a perverted form of self-humiliation, and announced her departure from the band. Fortunately, not before she got to bang more of those drums on New Magnetic Wonder, as well as contribute two of the best songs (or, frankly speaking, one, because 'Sunndal Song' and 'Sunday Sounds' are pret­ty much the exact same tune).

More importantly, they had enough time to correct the silly mistake they made on Velocity — ac­cidentally mutating into a generic alternative rock band, even if that was never the intention — and, this time, reinvent their sound in a way that is much more deserving of the Apples In Stereo­typical ideology. Sunny pop and psychedelia are back, in a big way, and now they are more tech­nological and futuristic than ever before. More than ten years, after all, have passed since their humble beginnings, and it is only too reasonable, chronologically, that they no longer salivate and slobber over Revolver, but rather over Electric Light Orchestra's A New World Record: the har­monies, the melodic moves, the big wall of sound, the sweet atmosphere of the Mellotrons and slide guitars, all of these things now treasure the Jeff Lynn legacy rather than John Lennon's.

It's a smart and seductive move, and it works. In conjunction with Schneider's songwriting skills that only seem to mature with age, it makes Magnetic Wonder one of the most instantly likeable Apples albums. Of course, nothing is perfect: for egotistic reasons, Schneider still had to fill it up with a set of brief «interludes», ranging from the already mentioned experiments in whuppin' Py­thagoras' ass to little bits of electronically encoded vocalizing and littler bits of dissonant piano playing. The result is a huge massive of 24 tracks, spread across two discs (even though the total running length is only slightly above 50 minutes), masking a group of tall-growing, healthy, but scattered trees under the guise of a dense, overwhelming forest.

Once you take out the scissors, though, and circumcise Schneider's big ego by throwing out all the fancy-wancy «artsiness», nothing is to detract you from just enjoying the music. The answer to 'Can You Feel It?' is by all means positive — the band opens the album with a frantic battle summon to "turn up your stereo", and even though the song still lets you feel the unpleasant echo­es of Velocity with its primitive grungy rhythm track, its melodic wah-wah lines and Schneider's insanely supplicating vocal melody more than compensate for it.

From then on, songs — as opposed to links — rarely let down. 'Energy' promises that "we're gon­na see sunlight" and, with but one verse repeated over and over again, is like a power pop mantra whose message could be annoying because of its repetitiveness if it weren't so goddamn true, not to mention catchy-friendly. 'Play Tough' finally gets it right about combining romantic atmosphe­re with memorable melodic lines — here is a song that is played, sung, and arranged in such a way that it could have fit in perfectly on the Kinks' Something Else (it even seems to borrow a few melodic moves from Ray Davies, including the descending scale of 'Sunday Afternoon'). Fi­nally, the line "you gotta get back to the place that you know you're gonna see your friends again" ('Radiation') gets my vote for «highest correlation of beauty and underratedness» in the band's en­tire catalog, if you know what I mean.

On a funny, but probably coincidental note, it is the band's most explicit Jeff Lynne imitation — 'Beautiful Machine, Parts 3-4' — that leaves me the coldest: injecting a lot of effort into the con­struction of an ELOesque sound wall, over which a distinct, shrill, Lynnesque nasal twang lays the vocals, they forget to add a pinch of feeling, and the song feels as hollow as their early Beat­les tributes, making the «Grande finale» a bit of a letdown after such a good set overall. But, heck, this is simply to remind us one more time, lest we forget, that The Apples In Stereo are not the Beatles, not the Kinks, and not even the new Electric Light Orchestra. Were they all of these things combined, would we have any incentive at all to go back to dusty «irrelevant» oldies? As it is, the pleasure is all mine to say it one more time: «Yes, Robert Schneider is a brilliant guy, in his own way, but if you like The Apples, all the more reason for you to take a true time machine, rather than a first-rate simulation». An honest thumbs up all the same, though, because, after all, real time machines work both ways.

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