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| Location: | Canada, Quebec, Montreal |
| Description: | THE APPLES IN STEREO: The Velocity Of Sound
PURRING IN YOUR LAP (And Scratching The Furniture)
When I first interviewed Robert Schneider over veggie burgers in San Francisco in 1997 his foot was tapping so hard under the table it made the french fries on his plate appear to be auditioning for the "Dancing Vegetables" sequence in Walt Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice. It was no accident.
The brains behind skewed-pop whiz kids the Apples In Stereo admits he has trouble slowing down. "I feel calm in my mind," he declares, "but my body's taking off." When Schneider talks about music his speech becomes an avalanche of double-clutches, 180-degree pirouettes and on-the-fly self-edits. A verbatim transcript of his pasionate outbursts would send a court reporter into early retirement.
Born in Capetown, South Africa, Schneider settled in Ruston, Louisiana at the age of six. His musical destiny was sealed when he attended a Cheap Trick concert with his best pal and sixth-grade classmate, Jeff Mangum (the eventual big kahuna behind indie-pop faves Neutral Milk Hotel). "When we got home," squeals Schneider breathlessly, "Jeff grabbed a tennis racquet, I found a baseball bat, and we air-guitared around his room to 'Dream Police' until his mom told us to shut up."
Along with two more Ruston buddies--Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss, co-founders of the lysergically hued Olivia Tremor Control--Schneider and Mangum launched a loose-knit psychedelic music appreciation society/record label called Elephant Six during their college years. The indie-rock universe has been slightly atilt ever since.
When Mangum, Hart and Doss moved on to the more fertile college-rock environs of Athens, Georgia, Schneider headed west, instead, to Denver. He soon met guitarist John Hill, bassist Eric Allen and drummer Hilarie Sidney (now Schneider's wife and mother of their young son, Max). The foursome began creating a mesmerizing series of heavenly, effects-drenched, full-length pop milkshakes by the Apples In Stereo: 1996's Fun Trick Noisemaker, 1997's Tone Soul Evolution and 2000's The Discovery Of A World Inside The Moone.
Then there were the Apples' mini-masterpieces like Science Fair, their 1996 collection of rare singles and EP tracks; Her Wallpaper Reverie, a 1998 cotton-candy acid trip; and Let's Go!, an EP that spotlights a chirpy Saturday-morning homage to everybody's favorite pint-size cartoon super-heroines, The Power Puff Girls. And Schneider has recently been collaborating, via trans-Atlantic phone cable to England, on a satchelful of songs with fabled XTC guru Andy Partridge. The fruits of this artistic cross-pollination are due soon on a Schneider side-project dubbed Orchestra Fantastique.
A man with more ideas during lunch than Albert Einstein had in a month, Schneider hits the deck running ("Every morning he sings me little wake-up songs," says Sidney) and currently has the Apples fine-tuned to a rich harmonic throb.
The table has been set for the helium-filled wonders of Velocity Of Sound, the superb new Apples In Stereo album destined to become a career-defining opus. It's all here: from the delightful sweet 'n' sour hum of lead-off hitters "Please" and "Rainfall" to the Ramones-ish teenage angst and Motors-like power-chord buzz of cleanup men "That's Something I Do" and "Do You Understand?"--followed by the Satanic Majesty of "Where We Meet," with plenty of Brian Wilson and Ray Davies dustings scattered throughout. Velocity Of Sound hits it out of the ballpark every time. Curiously, it's the Apples at their most melodic and their noisiest.
This appears to be the Apples album everyone knew Schneider had in him, smoking-gun evidence of his own self-fulfilling prophecy. When I asked him recently if it bugged him to be occasionally tarred with the "retro/unhip" brush, Schneider unflinchingly replied, "You know, I think It's good to not always be chasing what other people think is hip. You should chase what, at your purest and most naive time of life, you thought was 'the thing.' It's good to just chase that for the rest of your life. As soon as you lift up your head to look around, your art is doomed." Robert Schneider's life-affirming body of work with the Apples In Stereo may scratch the furniture once in a while but it can also purr in your lap like nobody's business.
JUD COST
Santa Clara, CA 2002 |
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