Look Away + Let's Go! Combo (TAIS 014)
Exclusively Available Here (2 Eps, 1 Download)

Look Away + 4 (2000)

This five-song EP finds The Apples in stereo in fine compositional form and typically at ease with their style of chameleonlike pop music. Sure, the Beach Boys/Beatles references are undeniable on Look Away + Four, but that's missing the point. Chances are, if it's pop of any form, it's made its way into The Apples' music. Sometimes influences are allowed to intermingle. Other times, disparate production sensibilities run back to back. On "Behind the Waterfall" for instance, The Apples give Fab Four stylings a new twist, as the band plays psychedelic carnival music from underwater (hence the title).

Singer Robert Schneider carries on as if it's business as usual. He remains unfazed when the band breaks out with impromptu chunks of distortion-fueled power chords from an entirely different song. The boisterous title track is more straightforward. A melody driven by tightly packed, nasally Beach Boys-style harmonies is punctuated with '70s soft rock horns. Similar is the infectious fuzzy jangle of the slacker ode "Everybody Let Up." Dedicated to the act of lying around, it opens with the lines, "I get such an easy feelin'/When I'm staring at the ceiling/From the morning to the evening/That's the life for me." Drummer Hilary Sidney even steps up to the mike and delivers a touching, whispery vocal on the light, bossa nova-ish ballad "Her Pretty Face." Look Away is as good an introduction as any to the overflowing pop vibrations of The Apples in stereo. 

Let's Go! (2001)

Let's Go is a five-song collection of odds and ends that should please and appease The Apples in stereo's fans between the band's full-length releases. Opening with the buoyant bebop pop of "Signal in the Sky" - written especially for the television cartoon The Powerpuff Girls and included on that show's soundtrack - the band has again created a shimmering soundtrack for afternoon summer BBQs and days at the shore. It's fitting, then, that the EP also includes a live cover of the Beach Boys' "Heroes & Villains," a longtime concert favorite that sounds ready-made for the ever-exuberant Apples in Stereo. Rounding out the release is the "Signal in the Sky" demo, an excellent solo-acoustic version of "Stream Running Over" (from the band's Discovery of a World Inside the Moone) and the new "If You Want to Wear a Hat." So while Let's Go isn't pushing any boundaries for the band, it offers up five more slices of pure pop that fans have come to expect of The Apples in stereo.