Track Listing

1. Her Room Is a Rainy Garden (Wallpaper Reverie Theme)
2. Morning Breaks (And Roosters Complain)
3. Shiney Sea
4. Significance of a Floral Print
5. Strawberryfire
6. From Outside, in Floats a Music Box
7. Ruby
8. She Looks Through Empty Windows
9. Questions and Answers
10. Drifting Patterns
11. Y2K
12. Amants
13. Benefits of Lying (With Your Friend)
14. Ruby, Tell Me
15. Together They Dream into the Evening

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #70424 in Music
• Released on: 2002-04-02
• Number of discs: 1

From Amazon.com
The great thing about being part of a musical collective is that not only can you draw from the work of your peers for inspiration, you can rely on your peers themselves. As part of Elephant 6, the Apples in Stereo are involved in a symbiotic relationship with such like-minded bands as Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel. For example, Apples frontman Robert Schneider produced a previous OTC album and OTC controller William Cullen Hart designed the artwork for the Apples' new record, Her Wallpaper Reverie. So it's no surprise that Wallpaper sounds like a more cohesive sequel to OTC's mind-bending Black Foliage. What is surprising is just how vast an improvement it is over the Apples' last sugary pop disc, Tone Soul Evolution. A psychedelic excursion threaded together with chiming, repetitive interludes, the album blends the styles of Revolver-era Beatles with those of Smile-era Beach Boys, resulting in a shimmering pop cocktail that's both crafty and infectious. Only two flaws: the interludes become a tad annoying and the album is only 27 minutes long, leaving the listener begging for more. Fortunately, most CDs have a repeat-play button. --Jon Wiederhorn

Album Description
1999 album, the follow-up their successful '97 album, 'Tone Soul Evolution'. A return to the fuzzy rock sound of their earlier releases while taking giant steps forward, it contains 15 tracks.

Customer Reviews

Pop psychédélique délicieux...
... Mais pas révolutionnaire. On se trouve en terrain déjà visité. Cela est fait avec classe et le trip est très satisfaisant. Pour du stock récent, on parle de très bon stock!
Servir à température de l'oreille interne sur un nuage de fumée... Bonne écoute!

Too much noodling, not enough songcraft
Her Wallpaper Reverie is simultaneously one of the best and worst CDs I've listened to in a long time. How can it be both at once, you're asking? Well, it's rather like this...

On one hand, you have the Apples' trademark ability to synthesize 60s pop down to absolutely brilliant and tasty pop nuggets. "The Shiney Sea" floats by like a lone cloud on a sunny day, "Ruby" almost effortlessly manages to sound both like early Beatles and create a song as catchy as anything the Beatles did in their early days, and there's, of course, the brilliant "Strawberryfire," which almost manages to outdo Lennon's psychadelic sound experiments like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

However, with every brilliant song such as this, there is the horrendous filler. I rather like psychadelia, but the stopgap tracks between songs are pure directionless noodling. None of them start anywhere and most of them end nowhere, leaving you to scratch your head. And that says nothing about the concept of this CD either. Who in their right mind would actually RECORD a CD about what happens when you take a few too many bonghits and stare at the wallpaper for a while?

If The Apples in Stereo had managed to cut the terrible filler tracks, we'd have a lovely 7 song EP as opposed to the bloated 15 track one they released instead. As such, you're going to have to take the good with the bad on this one if you're going to buy it. Otherwise, check out some of the Apples' other CDs first.

This is a good album.
This is the first album I got of theirs. I bought it a few days ago.

I must admit the first time I heard it (which was on headphones), The musical interludes after almost every track gave me a headache. The interludes are good, with the exception of Drifting Patterns (It shouldn't be over a minute long, let alone two). But with every listen, it gets better and better. Even though I've only had it 9/23/03 and today is 9/27/03, It ranks as one of my favorites. Benefits of Lying (With Your Friend) and Questions & Answers are my favorites, but every track has its own special quality.

I must note that if you plan to listen to the whole album (musical interludes and all) and get the whole experience, listen to it aloud. But if you want to get a quick fix on headphones, just listen to tracks 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 14.

This album is near perfect.