The First Apples in Stereo album in five years, New Magnetic Wonder intersperses 13 full songs with 11 musical fragments, a scheme similar to some classic Eno discs. It's unlikely, however, that trend spotters will spend much time studying those snippets, most of which seem simply to be pieces of the finished tunes' opulent arrangements. The big news here is not the ephemeral asides, but that singer, composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Robert Schneider has moved beyond his mid-1960s inspirations -- all the way into the early 1970s. As surely as lyrics that extol "energy" and "the sound of happiness," the cowbells, vocoders and wah-wah evoke the era that mainstreamed the flower-child vibe.

The album opens with a good-timey ode to feel-good music -- "Can You Feel It?" -- that's infectiously anachronistic. "Turn up your stereo," chorus The Apples, as if they'd never heard of the iPod. Although "Play Tough" leans a bit on the Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset," such songs as "Skyway" and "Same Old Drag" owe more to The Apples' previous folk- and garage-rock models. This is but a small jump forward, but the brightly beaming New Magnetic Wonder almost makes it sound like a major stylistic advance.

-- Mark Jenkins