Veteran pop-rock band stops in Athens during tour promoting new CD
Alan Sculley
September 13, 2007
It's not surprising to figure that Robert Schneider has lofty goals for his band Apples in Stereo's records after noticing that on the new CD, "New Magnetic Wonder," he includes a snippet of a song using a new musical scale that he's invented.
In press materials for the new CD, Schneider, in fact, says he wanted to make a CD that felt "life affirming and real, yet ultra hi-fi and unreal at the same time." He laments that such a record may not be technically feasible.
Schneider's bandmate, bassist Eric Allen, isn't quite so critical.
"I would disagree (with Schneider) and say this album to me is all those things," Allen said in a recent phone interview in advance of the band's show Friday at the Union. "But I know how it is. Robert's got stuff in his head that he'd like to hear on tape, and has not yet."
Chances are fans of creative, finely crafted power pop will side with Allen once they hear "New Magnetic Wonder," which could very well end 2007 as the year's best pop album.
That the Apples In Stereo returned to action with such a stellar effort won't come as a surprise to fans of the group's previous CDs.
Beginning with the 1995 CD, "Fun Trick Noisemaker," the Apples - Schneider, Allen, guitarist John Hill and drummer Hilarie Sidney - had released five previous CDs of finely crafted music that ranged from textured psychedelic pop to stripped-down guitar pop.
But as the five-year gap between the band's previous CD, 2002's "Velocity Of Sound," and the new CD suggests, "New Magnetic Wonder" was both ambitious and challenging.
There were outside factors that contributed to the long delay between albums. For one thing, several band members took time to work on other projects.
Another issue was far more personal - the divorce of husband and wife Schneider and Sidney. Although Sidney remained with the band for the entire "New Magnetic Wonder" project, she recently left to devote her full energies to her other band, High Water Marks.
"I think they did really well with it for a while, and certainly a lot better than I would have done under the circumstances," Allen said when asked if the divorce had been disruptive for the band. "But yeah, I think they're both in a really good place now and happy with their lives, and it's just kind of natural for Hilarie to separate from the band."
But the recording of "New Magnetic Wonder" itself was lengthy, stretching out over 18 months and involved work in five studios in five different cities.
While the logistics of the project created challenges, Allen said "New Magnetic Wonder" became a better CD because of the time that went into the project.
"We really got to spend a lot of time listening to rough mixes and the kind of stuff that was unfinished, and it just sort of germinated," he said. "I think if we had the money to crank the album out in two months, I don't think it would be nearly as rich as it is now."
Listening to "New Magnetic Wonder," (which was co-released by Yep Roc Records and the new label owned by actor Elijah Woods, Simian Records), one can see that the time and effort that went into the project was worthwhile.
A multi-faceted and typically upbeat collection, "New Magnetic Wonder" has songs such as "Can You Feel It?" and "7 Stars" that recall the peppy pop of the 2000 CD, "The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone," while the group's more raucous, guitar-centric sound emerges on tunes like "Skyway" and "Sundial Song." Between those extremes, fall songs like "Same Old Drag" (a keyboard-based tune that might inspire comparisons to Ben Folds), the gorgeous melancholy of the ballad "Play Tough" and the dreamy psychedelia of "Open Eyes."
The sonic detail in the music, of course, will take some doing to recreate in a live setting. To meet that challenge, the Apples In Stereo has expanded from the previous four-person lineup to six band members, with keyboardists Bill Doss (formerly of Olivia Tremor Control) and John Ferguson (of Ulysses) joining Schneider, Hill, Allen and new drummer John Dufilho (formerly of the Deathray Davies).
The new lineup has created a very different dynamic on stage.
"For me, it feels kind of like a new band," Allen said. "When you've hung out with someone (Sydney) for 10 or 11 years, you know, it's like a comfortable pair of shoes, or sometimes an uncomfortable pair of shoes. But you know everything about them, about their families. You've spent so much time traveling together. So in a way, it makes me kind of feel like I'm in a new band, which I like the feeling actually because it will kind of break you out of some of your comfort areas and make you think about things differently than you have in a while."
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