Robert Schneider's break from the Apples in Stereo after 2002's Velocity of Sound felt like a necessity. After Her Wallpaper Reverie, the band's 1999 peak, they seemed determined to transcend their status as the Elephant 6 Scene Band, making two divergent stabs at self-reinvention. The problem with both of the records that followed had less to do with conception than execution: The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone's too-similar songs were coated in thick studio sheen, while Velocity attempted to regain a lo-fi quality with a grain-and-flicker filter.
Much of Schneider's hiatus was devoted to fleshing out his long-running Marbles side project. The first cohesive result, 2005's Expo, was a slight but promising new direction for Schneider, demonstrating his willingness to follow Elephant 6 compatriot (and Expo tourmate) Kevin Barnes down the electro-pop pathway, but to a different end; while Barnes positioned himself as an increasingly glammed-out showman, Schneider assumed the form of the nerdy lab-rat. In a 2005 Pitchfork artist list, Schneider claimed Gary Numan and Electric Light Orchestra as Expo touchstones, and the record's tone certainly supported it, but in strictly sonic terms. Schneider lifted the synth tone of Tubeway Army's Replicas for sure, but certainly not its dystopic view of technology (could there be a more polar opposite to "Me I Disconnect From You" than "Circuit"?), while the more readily apparent Jeff Lynne influence drew directly from ELO's late-period era of FM dominance.
Schneider's science infatuation and retro-fetishism translates to prodigious amounts of studio experimentation, and New Magnetic Wonder certainly aims to have the best of both worlds. The album's title alludes to his affection for analog recording equipment, but his insatiable thirst for overdubs (one song was ProTooled from 96 tracks) points to the contrary: Not a single second of the record is left un-manipulated. Longtime Apples drummer Hilarie Sydney's two songs suggest that Schneider's new expansive direction might have its limits. Her voice-- the Apples' own Isobel Campbell-- is far too slight to stand alone amongst the album's excess: Schneider buries her "Sunday Sounds" vocals under layers of echo and shadows the chorus of "Sunndal Song" with vocoder that sounds more lecherous than majestic. She simply sounds lost in all that excess, her attempted simplicity drowned out in Schneider's exhaustive arrangements.
Like each Apples record since Reverie, Wonder reflects yet another revision of the form-- if not necessarily the style-- of Schneider's pre-millennial Elephant 6 work. Album midpoint "Sun Is Out" is a self-conscious glance backwards to the rural psychedelia of the group's mid-90s output, and the thick drone of "Open Eyes" is easily the most enjoyable update of that sound. Yet the most obvious callbacks are the "link tracks," which aim for the quasi-cinematic coherence of Olivia Tremor Control's exquisite psych-suite Dusk at Cubist Castle (engineered and produced by Schneider), as well as Reverie. While these songs suggest Schneider's appreciation for the short-form work of electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, they stop well short of giving Wonder the thematic consistency it seeks (and needs).
The bonus materials on the enhanced portion of Wonder include a video that details Schneider's "Non-Pythagorean Musical Scale", in which he outlines a new approach to the age-old rational tuning system. He admits there's still some work to be done, and only hesitantly incorporates his findings into the record. Although mostly tangential to the music itself, Schneider's research project underscores the impression that Wonder is his first attempt to let his geek flag fly, to embrace his inner math and physics club, and let it dictate the content of a record, not just the mode of its production.
