Consumer Guide Album

The Apples in Stereo: New Magnetic Wonder [Yep Roc, 2007]
Rock 'n' roll doesn't need Robert Schneider's "non-Pythagorean" scales to combat mind-body dualism. But Schneider's romance with ELO was just what he needed to add heft to his Beatles fixation--the aura of middlebrow seriousness puts his formalist musings on track. "And the world is made of energy/And the world is possibility" is Heraclitean pop at its cutest and acutest, the drug advice addresses prescription meds and he understands the fatal parallel between information and radiation, which is that too much of either can make you sick. Even the Mellotron interludes compute on the album where the Elephant Six finally get their shtick together. A