THE APPLES IN STEREO - Her Wallpaper Reverie

2008 reissue, 15 tracks. Sometimes it seems as if the entire Elephant 6 collective is hell bent on re-creating the soundtrack to "Yellow Submarine." Songwriting machine Robert Schneider and his band of merry pranksters, The Apples In Stereo, come as close as anyone ever has in this fuzzy, buzzy, fun-trick-noisemaker of a disc. The Apples' sunshine-y and singable pop is as influenced by late 60's Beach Boys as it is by The Beatles. It's dizzy, pretty and so aggressively cute in fact, that your pre-schooler will take a shine to it (except for the prominent use of the "F" word on "Y2K"). There's the welcome addition of drummer Hilarie Sidney's incredibly catchy tune, "Questions And Answers." And, of course, there's the E6 mandatory synthesizer free-for-all. The whole package is tied together with a clever recurring theme, plucked out on a toy piano.

�4 � stars. Her Wallpaper Reverie is the Apples in Stereo's finest effort to date -- the band's most overtly psychedelic record, it's also their most experimental, achieving a near-perfect balance between candy-colored popcraft and musique concr�te-influenced interludes. In a sense, the disc is a response to the grand ambitions of fellow Elephant 6-ers Olivia Tremor Control and their likeminded Black Foliage album, but the Apples' integration of Beatlesque melodies and experimental noises is much more seamless; not only are Her Wallpaper Reverie's songs the best Robert Schneider's yet written, but they're produced with a new richness of detail -- from the wonderfully Lennon-esque "Strawberryfire" to the Kinks-ish "Ruby," the music positively shimmers.�-AMG.