Robert Schneider, chief architect of the Apples in stereo, has a way of answering a question that suggests he's been keeping himself vigilant on the road with double espressos every 15 minutes. His responses come in flurries, as ideas pile into one another which requires Schneider to untangle and resequence them at the same speed at which they just crashed. Listening to him operate at this level makes one wonder why it took so long for the Apples to finally make an album that reflects Schneider's frenetic road personality. With the furiously raved-up adrenalinized rock of the Apples's latest album, The Velocity of Sound, the band has taken a giant leap toward matching Schneider's rapid-fire touring persona, which is the very thing that has stoked the band in the live setting from the beginning. "We've been trying for awhile, but I'd missed out on a few key ingredients with the blaring," says Schneider with a laugh. "I always tried to blare like Phil Spector, now I'm trying to blare like Phil Spector and the Ramones."

Schneider's history bears out that comparison. Even as he first huddled under the umbrella of the Elephant Six collective with co-conspirators Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel), Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss (both of Olivia Tremor Control), Schneider was the odd man out. While Mangum, Hart, and Doss were using their respective bands to sculpt psychedelic dadaist sonic art out of pop music clay, Schneider was steering the Apples (guitarist John Hill, bassist Eric Allen and drummer/Mrs. Schneider Hilarie Sidney) toward a vision of indie pop perfection with carefully constructed shrines to Brian Wilson's “Heroes and Villains” and the raw majesty of conceptual-era Kinks and Beatles, with touches of the Velvet Underground. Over the course of six years and an exquisite catalog of albums, singles and EPs, the Apples have remained resolute in their pursuit of the twittering pop machine, adding sheets of gilt-edged intricacy to a beautiful foundation of classically influenced indie pop. With each successive album, Schneider seemed increasingly enamored of the studio's role as the band's fifth member with the ideas and constructions growing more elaborate.

With Velocity of Sound, Schneider wanted to simultaneously remove the ornamentation that had oversaturated his purer creative vision as well as the pushing out some of the influences that helped create that atmosphere from the outset. "My goal on this record was to capture the real sound of our band that's distinct from all our heroes," says Schneider. "On other records, I've tried to add our sound into the sound of all the stuff I'm into. On this record, our goal was to make it sound like a rock band in our own garage, including all the things that I think are charming about us. In that I was trying to capture what's unique about our band, I think it's our least influenced album. At the same time, we did have influences from the start, there we were holding onto for god-like figures, like Brian Wilson, the Feelies, the Velvets, the Kinks. That was the thing we held onto the most."

The only problem with the Apples's studio conjurings was in trying to translate them from an album listening experience to a see-the-show experience. Schneider and the band were forced to view their material in the much more visceral and stripped down light of the live setting, and while the songs always benefitted from the added vigor and the lessened texture, the gap between the two was extreme and undeniable.

"We've always been really into our band, but we've been a slightly, just slightly, arty affair from time to time, a little more psychedelic, and a lot of times we into it more as stoners," says Schneider with a laugh. "In the past, we sounded like Blue Cheer live and our records sounded like the Beach Boys. Some of the more pop-oriented fans would sometimes be disappointed when they came to see us live. Live, we always took a completely different approach from the record. On the records, we'd go for a more lush sound. Live, we'd replace the lushness with a fuzzy sort of loudness. On Velocity, we took that approach for the record." After the completion of and subsequent touring for 2000's The Discovery Of A World Inside The Moone, Schneider began working on the songs that he naturally intended for the next Apples record. As the material coalesced, Schneider noticed his new songs were only slight variations on the songs from Moone, and as he began to accumulate more songs, he began to subconsciously write more along the lines of the punk records he had recently been immersed in, and by chance that approach also emulated the Apples's rehearsal and live sound.

"I had already written a whole album, more in the style of the last album, sort a White Album-y kind of feel," says Schneider. "A lot of songs that didn't make it on the last album plus a few R&B songs, that we were planning on recording at some point. What happened was over a period of just a few months, I wrote a ton of these loud, more power pop/punk kind of songs. I got really excited about it. We started having band practice and every time we learned a song, it just clicked immediately. I didn't want it to get tighter. We practiced for the album quite a lot and did some touring, but we didn't get to know the songs that well, so it was cool when we were recording. I tried to get the first or second take of every song so that we could just be rambling through it. There's a certain sense that not knowing where the hell you are in a song is appealing if you're capturing it on a record."

Throwing out anything that sounded too much like Discovery (other than a couple of transitional tracks like "Mystery" and "Where We Meet"), Schneider contacted his fellow Apples on New Year's Day last year to let them know that the new record was ready to record. The band was assembled in Schneider's home studio the following day. "I wanted to make a record that was a little more pure, a little more honest to what we do," says Schneider. "Not that what we did before wasn't pure or honest, I really wanted to get the sound of our band and what it feels like when we play. We like to turn it up, and Hilarie's a loud drummer, so it turned out that way. The other thing is that I'd never really been trying to be retro, but I've always liked referencing music I love in our music. So I tried to avoid doing that as much as possible and also try to be pure and capture the soul of our band, and try to get back to the original concept of the band which was a psychedelic garage rock band." Velocity of Sound is an apt title for the propulsive results of Schneider's intention to peel away the layers of sonic frippery that had begun to define the Apples's studio output. Part of Velocity's immediacy is drawn from the fact that Schneider wrote almost half of the album's songs after the band began recording and the sparer sonic direction took root. And some of it is equally due to the departure of the Apples's keyboardist Chris McDuffie, which forced the band to not only rethink their process but also to rely on a more basic set-up to accomplish their goals. Although Schneider admits that he will always be interested in the possibilities afforded by the studio's capability to achieve that still-desirable wall of sound, he also is quick to claim that Velocity of Sound is more direction than diversion. "It's a trend that's been happening for years," says Schneider. "Like I said, this record just reflects the way we've sounded in our live show since we started our band. You can listen to Science Faire, which is a compilation of singles and stuff we did before our first album, and those first few songs on Science Faire are our first EP, and we recorded the basic tracks for that live, and it sounds really similar to the way our band has always sounded. So in a sense, the direction was a production choice to not try to create this tapestry but to just try to take a photograph. I wanted to try to do the opposite at every point of what I would usually do. This record is drastically different in almost every way from what I've done in the past and I like that. It was a spontaneous and cool experience and there was a lot of energy involved that did get captured on the record, which was my goal from the start."

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