The title is a joke, except not-- the Apples in Stereo have never had a real hit, but singer/songwriter/producer Robert Schneider's long-running crew has always been attracted to the sound of hits, the aesthetics of hits, and the melodies of (specific) hits. They've just never had much time for the economic framework of hits, and although Sire co-released Tone Soul Evolution back in 1997 when it briefly looked like anything could blow up, the Apples have generally presented themselves as a DIY operation. Their home-brewed approximation of late-60s psychedelic pop is removed both temporally and culturally from the audience they often pretend they're playing to. (They've also barely released any singles: they're an album band and a live act.)
It turns out, though, that isolating songs from their records and scrambling their chronology does them neither good nor harm. This best-of spanning the six albums they've made in the last decade and a half is their most straightforward record: no trippy gestures or between-song links, thanks, just Schneider's better hooks lined up end-to-end, plus a couple of showcases for now-departed drummer Hilarie Sidney. (The one non-album track is probably the Apples' most widely exposed song, the adorable Powerpuff Girls soundtrack contribution "Signal in the Sky [Let's Go]".)
Schneider was arguably the engine of the Elephant 6 collective, the guy whose work ethic and low-budget ingenuity turned his friends' dreams and jams into actual records like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and Dusk at Cubist Castle. His greatest weakness as a frontman is that he has nothing in particular to say lyrically ("It's gonna be all right/ It's gonna be all right, uh-huh, yeah"); the strength that covers up for it is that he's figured out all the tricks of 40-year-old psych-pop production, chief among which is keeping something new and ear-grabbing jumping out of the speakers every few seconds. (Schneider's never heard a backing vocal he didn't like, especially if it sounds like something John Lennon could have sung.) He also likes to work in stray bits of melody from 40-year-old records: the very first line of the first song here, "Energy", echoes Jackie DeShannon's "Put a Little Love in Your Heart", and "Seems So" suggests an intimate familiarity with the Beatles' "You Won't See Me".
The Apples' sound has been remarkably consistent over time; aside from the ELO tendencies and digitalisms that turn up on the four songs here from 2007's New Magnetic Wonder, this set could just as well document a single year in the life of a band, and it wouldn't be clear what year. (The unfancy crunch of 2002's "Please" is the only real nod to their .38 Special-ish live sound.) What's missing from #1 Hits Explosion is a sense of why a hitless, consistent album act needs a retrospective. If it were the only Apples record, it'd be a shock and a delight. Given that there's been only one new album by the band in the past seven years, though, it feels like a time-marking gesture-- a mixtape whose only argument about the Apples is how reliable they are.
