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The Apples in Stereo: "The Rainbow"
I think I’m going through a little Pixies withdrawal today, after five in a row last week. I had a lot of fun with that, but while Pixies Week was in full swing, the world kept on spinnin’ round, hard as it might be to believe. And during one of those spins, as I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, the world lost Steve Jobs, creative/technological/entrepreneurial genius. Of course, enough has been said about him that there’s nothing I can say here that would be of much interest, but I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to dedicate today’s song to him anyway.
And for that, what band would be more fitting than the Apples in Stereo? Since 1995, Robert Schneider and cohorts have created some of the most effervescent pop-rock concoctions this side of The Archies (and even better, they’re not a cartoon band). They were founding members of the Elephant 6 Collective/Recording Company, which also included such great bands — and past and future Reselect selections — as Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, Beulah, Of Montreal, Dressy Bessy, and The Minders. Major commercial success has eluded the Apples (which seems to be the case for most Elephant 6 bands), but creatively, there are few better power-pop songwriters than Schneider.
In 2000, The Apples in Stereo released The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone [sic] [which is to say, “that’s the way they spelled it, don’t blame me for a typo”], an album that brought them back to Revolver-era, Beatlesque sounds after a foray into experimentalism on Her Wallpaper Reverie. One of the best songs on Discovery of a World was “The Rainbow,” a supremely catch song that many songwriters would kill to be able to call their own, but the likes of which Schneider seems to be able to write in his sleep. A couple listens to “The Rainbow” and you’re very likely to find it popping into your head all day long. A look at the lyrics brings us back to the dedication of this post, as they reflect on the ephemeral nature of people and their perceptions.
These lyrics sum it up best:
Baby don’t you know
People come and go
Ooh, just like the rainbow
Original post date: October 10, 2011