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The Apples in Stereo, Travellers in Space and Time

review by dave heaton

Travellers in Space and Time comes cloaked in space imagery, as you might have guessed. But not that cloaked. If there’s a big concept or overarching story here, and I’m sure that there is, it doesn’t matter. What the future means for the music is vocoders, disco-ish tempos and synthesizers added to the band’s usual ‘60s-through the ‘90s melodic pop-rock. Oh, and the love songs contain more references to solar systems, computers, and the future.

The future sounds like a child growing up in the ‘70s might have imagined it to sound like, if they spent more time watching cartoons and reading comic books than, say, listening to Kraftwerk and Parliament-Funkadelic. If vocoders, synths, and disco rhythms sounded cool then, they sound cool now too, if more quaint. The sense of wonder at what could happen might not live in the sounds themselves anymore, but is made the subject of the songs, from the opening question “what do you see / when you dream about the future?” to the reference near the end to “taking your wings away”, which suggests the way adulthood robs us of that sense of wonder (I also think of those metal wings given out by airlines).

The anthem “Dance Floor” traffics in both wonder and disappointment, and sets it in troubled times (“when our world is so confusing”). “I want to feel that my future’s just coming,” singer Robert Schneider declares, marking the album as trying to generate that feeling, perhaps. There are enough city/town references to make you imagine the space travel talk is a stand-in for the way people these days are ever on the move, for jobs or relationships or personal taste. “We float along / no direction / no gravity / no recollection”, is sung by overlapping voices.

The album on the whole has enough “she’s packed her bags and left me”-type references to make the lost-in-space stuff seem a metaphor for good old-fashioned heartbreak. “I tell myself I’m doing fine”, he sings, but there he is, sitting in the basement with his Star Wars Legos, acting out an elaborate space opera and calling it, Travellers in Space and Time.

{www.yeproc.com}


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