t’s been five years since the Apples in Stereo last released a record. In that time the band’s ringleader, Robert Schneider, moved states (Colorado to Kentucky), record labels (spinART to Elijah Wood's upstart Simian), and went through a divorce with Apples drummer Hilarie Sidney. (Though she still drummed on this album, she’s since left the fold to concentrate on her own band, the High Water Marks.) You could argue it’s been a turbulent time for Robert Schneider. But if it has, he doesn’t want you to talk about it—the first line of New Magnetic Wonder urges the listener to turn up their stereo.

Whether it’s a stirring sentiment of audio adoration or a masking of moods is open to interpretation. One thing’s for sure: The Apples have always been unerringly upbeat. Like a dog owner wrapping their pet’s pills in cheese, the Apples even concealed their more somber moments in multi-layered guitars and da da backing vocals. Unlike Of Montreal, whose recent album explicitly imbues its heartbreak with glitter, the closest the Apples come to specifically stating any sort of sadness is during “Play Tough” when we’re told that “Saturday is not the ideal day to break up / Don’t you know it takes a little time to wake up?”

For fans of the band, this elementary songwriting style shouldn’t be surprising. Schneider was always the straight man in the Elephant 6 circus. While Jeff Mangum and Will Cullen Hart (who provide some musical backing here) were playing in their high school noise band Maggot, Schneider and new Apples guitarist Bill Doss covered the Beatles and REM in their own band, Fat Planet. On New Magnetic Wonder Schneider doesn’t exactly step outside his musical box, but he does redesign it, shaping the walls from the inside, expanding the barriers.

In fact, Schneider went so far as to create a new musical language, the Non-Pythagorean Music Scale, for the album. A novel if not exactly new concept, he used equations based on the properties of natural logarithms to replace the standard 12 tones in a musical octave with a different set of frequencies. Several of these new frequencies show up in the 12 instrumental link tracks that segue between the 14 “real” songs, à la Her Wallpaper Reverie, making New Magnetic Wonder a sprawling mass of tunes and teasers. For the most part, the link tracks work as palette cleansers; teeth brushing for Schneider’s saccharine tunes.

Abandoning the brevity of 2002’s Velocity of Sound, New Magnetic Wonder is a meatier, more sinewy older sibling to 1995 debut Fun Trick Noisemaker. Those disappointed with Velocity’s, raw, live sound, will see this album as a return to form. Those that dug its easily digestible garage rock will, in turn, view New Magnetic Wonder as a step forward. Recorded over 12 months in five different locales, the album cross-pollinates crunchy garage rock riffs, cod-psychedelic undertones, and bubblegum melodies with the Apples’ usual infusion of ‘60s pop.

Endearing and over-earnest; sweet and cloying; bold and bloated, New Magnetic Wonder is the Apples in Stereo’s best record to date. Unfortunately, it doesn’t finish when it should, with the closing crescendo of “Beautiful Machine Parts 3 + 4.” But instead, two sonic snippets dull the edges, allowing the album to end on a bum (albeit new) Non-Pythagorean note.