Silver Apples

IdleRich

IdleRich
Don't think there has been a thread on these but prepared to be proved wrong...
Anyway, just re-bought the first album yesterday on vinyl (used to have it on cd when I was younger) and listened to it properly for the first time in ages. I'd forgotten just how good it was, a fairly unique sound I think (for the time) but the thing that always impressed me is just how immediate and "poppy" they sound and how exciting the drumming is. I just like pop music I guess but I'd be interested to know what everyone else thinks about them.
 

henry s

Street Fighting Man
should be no shortage of Silver Apples love 'round these parts...I've always thought of them as Suicide fronted by Arthur Lee...one of my favorite SA songs, "You And I", has a classic dum-dum beat, and the nagging synth line has that same "strangled sax" quality you hear in so many Bomb Squad productions...it's no wonder they are equally feted by both the trip-hop/electronica and post-rock camps...they also have another song (whose name always slips me..."Fantasies", maybe?) where the singer does an uncanny W.C. Fields delivery...and all those banjoes!...and that picture of the two hippies in the cockpit on their second LP cover...lots of things that just don't add up, which is precisely why they were great...
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"should be no shortage of Silver Apples love 'round these parts"
That's what I thought.

"...I've always thought of them as Suicide fronted by Arthur Lee..."
Funny you should say that, I remember describing them to someone years ago as a cross between Love and....I can't remember actually, pretty sure it wasn't Suicide but still we're on roughly the same wave-length.
I might have to re-buy the second album now.
What about the more recent solo project type stuff - any good?
 

Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
henry s said:
I've always thought of them as Suicide fronted by Arthur Lee...

I tend to describe them either as the hippy Suicide, or as a cross between Throbbing Gristle and The Seeds. Top, top band - I would love to be in a band like that.

I often muse on what the current state of music would be if, instead of Kraftwerk, it had been the Silver Apples who graduated from the counterculture into 70s oddball novelty act, and thus to seminal influence on post-punk and beyond music - one of the great what ifs of music history IMO. What would techno sound like if its raw DNA was wide-eyed arty NY acid psyche instead of gently ironic mittle-europe abstraction?
 

henry s

Street Fighting Man
IdleRich said:
What about the more recent solo project type stuff - any good?
I never heard much of the late-90's stuff...(being that it was the Simeon plus a couple of youngsters, just didn't seem to be a true Silver Apples event...of course, one of those youngsters went on to do some nice stuff as Sybarite, so maybe that stuff is worth another pass)...
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Have any live bootlegs from the early days ever surfaced? I always wonder how Simeon managed to control all that stuff! Must have been quite a sight, knees and elbows akimbo, and singing too :)

What a fantastic band. Not inconceivable that they had an influence on Kraftwerk.
 

hamarplazt

100% No Soul Guaranteed
Gabba Flamenco Crossover said:
I often muse on what the current state of music would be if, instead of Kraftwerk, it had been the Silver Apples who graduated from the counterculture into 70s oddball novelty act, and thus to seminal influence on post-punk and beyond music - one of the great what ifs of music history IMO. What would techno sound like if its raw DNA was wide-eyed arty NY acid psyche instead of gently ironic mittle-europe abstraction?
I think it could be argued that there actually is a small micro-lineage showing the Silver Apple-genes potential for development:
Silver Apples --> Suicide --> Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
They all share this odd funklesness of the beats and sequencers, a detatched linearity that has none of discos massive drive. This is probably why there isn't really an obvious techno descendant to this lineage, even though it did seem like a logical step from Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"Silver Apples, White Noise, United States of America, so good."
True, but I wouldn't necessarily have grouped them together. I would have said in particular that White Noise and Silver Apples are completely different - one is kind of shapeless and dark, the other is much more rigidly shaped by the beats and, whilst there may be a dark heart to it, the actual sound is very light. My copy of White Noise has the boring cover but if you have the one with the lightning storm aganst a black sky that seems to go rather well with the music whereas I think that Silver Apples go much better with a sunny day.
I think of White Noise as much more similar to these:

http://www.hipwax.com/music/oddpop/moog_mg.html

http://www.musicweb-international.com/encyclopaedia/b/B61.HTM
 
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