When The Apples In Stereo returned from their hiatus in 2007 with New Magnetic Wonder (QRO review), their first new studio record in five years, the band managed to avoid having their sunny sounds seem out of place by updating their neo-sixties into hi-fi. But since then, while the band has appeared on The Colbert Report (the second time for singer/guitarist Robert Schneider, who also opened up Colbert’s guitar battle with The Decemberists’ Chris Funk in December ’06), and have put out both a b-sides/rarities, Electronic Projects for Musicians, and greatest hits, #1 Hits Explosion, in the past two years, new material has been relatively silent. Meanwhile, drummer Hilarie Sidney departed, leaving (ex-husband) Schneider as the only ‘charter Apple’ with the band since its 1992 start. Moreover, the neo-Beatles sound that The Apples started way back when as part of the Elephant Six Collective has come decidedly back in style (and not just the serious success of Sixer of Montreal), whether the early-period sweetness in acts like Dr. Dog (QRO live review) or Drink Up Buttercup (QRO album review), or the late-period psych-ness in bands like MGMT (QRO live review). So how have The Apples stayed timely in their time travel on new studio full-length Travellers In Space and Time? By bringing the sunnier climes to synths, disco, and more.
Wonder saw Schneider debut his ‘Non-Pythagorean Scale’, a sort of hippie mathematician’s attempt to reinvent the music scale, and was peppered with short ‘link tracks’. Such mini-tracks are largely removed from Time, save for a recorded intro & two recorded outros of a voice speaking like in a recorded lesson plan, and if complex mathematics are in there, they’re well beneath synths & catchy sixties sounds on pieces such as "Dream About the Future", "Hey Elevator", "No One In the World" and "No Vacation". But The Apples have also brought their approach to a disco-dance style, not dark and bass-driven like so much indie-disco these days, or superficial like mainstream electro-dance, but purely sunny, like some cross-decades cheery Beatles in an upbeat, solar-powered discotheque. It can get over-cheesy at times, like in some moments of single "Dance Floor", or a little out of the band’s wheelhouse, such as with "Dignified Dignitary", but reaches its zenith near the end with "Floating In Space", "Nobody But You", and "Wings Away".
Travellers In Space and Time has a few too many songs, like every Apples In Stereo release (none of which have had less than eleven songs – Magnetic had twenty-four!): closer "Time Pilot" is just recorded voices & an electronic fade-away, and the airier "C.P.U." & "Told You Once" a little simplistic and sugary. But then there’s the following "It’s All Right", a kind of "Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head" for the neo-disco set, both markedly original and comfortingly familiar.
