Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Neutral Milk Hotel
Label: Merge Records
Released: 1998
The day I discovered this record, my life literally changed. Some records have that power over our lives. Those two sentences aren’t exactly original, since I’ve come across them on the internet in all sorts of word combinations, always meaning the same thing, in connection with In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. But they hold true for my experience too. Not in the sense that anything special actually happened to me because of this record, but in the sense that ever since I heard it, I don’t think quite the way I did before. So it’ll probably be hard to stay objective in the lines below, though objectivity may not even matter all that much with this album.
The music of Neutral Milk Hotel, the project of charismatic singer, poet and musician Jeff Mangum, speaks above all to the emotional side of human experience. On first encounter with the album, which was inspired by Jeff’s experience of reading The Diary of Anne Frank, that impression might not hit you right away, but it digs deeper with every second you listen.
The very first song, ‘King of The Carrot Flowers Part One’, opens with a mix of dreamy and traumatic memories from some childhood, sung by Jeff in his trademark voice, hauled up from deep down, somewhere out of his gut, and it announces something we’re not used to hearing every day. Then it only builds from there and gets very, very intense. In the third track, the album’s title song, a mournful trumpet cuts in for the first time, and suddenly it becomes clear that this music is dealing with something life-or-death at its core. That’s when we might perk up again at what Jeff is singing, and in his words we’re immediately hit with a fierce will to live and a veiled tenderness, alongside intense, powerful images of death. And the song closes on the line: “how strange is to be anything at all.”
Next comes ‘Two-Headed Boy’, a song where Jeff pounds on his acoustic guitar and sings, at times almost screaming, strange lyrics about freaks fused together in a glass jar, which suddenly shift into a story about starved, greedy, hopeless love, with something dark and menacing seeming to hang over it. In short, in some strange way we get a taste of the feeling of The Diary of Anne Frank, and probably a pretty different one from when we read that book as mandatory school reading.
In this style, which weaves together ragged, lo-fi guitars, organs that sound like a sentimental backdrop, acoustic guitar parts and assorted brass, the record carries on right to the end without letting up in intensity. ‘Holland 1945’ sounds like a surreal, wild Mexican party celebrating love and death at the same time, and somewhere near the end the tuba turns downright circus-like. Then comes ‘Communist Daughter’, where aloof innocence and dreamy lust intertwine, and the most intense stretch of the album is probably the eight-minute-plus ‘Oh, Comely’, where Jeff literally “falls out” while retelling, and you can hear in his voice how exhausting it is for him, a story about some sort of conjoined twins who are clearly on the run, comparing their experiences of this world while they wait for death in each other’s arms.
Anne Frank, who inspired the record, barely shows up on it, except maybe as a hint (and she doesn’t need to), and there’s little on it overall that’s literally understandable or easy to put into words. Musically, the record is a mix of styles that bands like Black Heart Procession, Arcade Fire or Decemberists try to recreate with similar intensity these days, but even though they’re top-notch bands, they don’t come anywhere close. Maybe that’s also why American music journalists are still so obsessed with Jeff Mangum almost ten years after the record came out, he having withdrawn from public life soon after its release. As far as I’m concerned, he did more than he ever needed to, because In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is, at least in my humble opinion, a classic and one of those rare exceptional records that time won’t get the better of.
author: Uroš
Lineup
Jeff Mangum – guitar, vocals, organ, effects, etc.
Jeremy Barnes – drums, organ
Scott Spillane – trumpet, horn, trombone, tuba
Julian Koster – banjo, accordion, effects, etc.
Production
Neutral Milk Hotel
Track list
1. The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One – 2:00
2. The King of Carrot Flowers Pts. Two and Three – 3:06
3. In the Aeroplane over the Sea – 3:22
4. Two-Headed Boy – 4:26
5. The Fool – 1:53
6. Holland, 1945 – 3:12
7. Communist Daughter – 1:57
8. Oh Comely – 8:18
9. Ghost – 4:08
10. Untitled – 2:16
11. Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two – 5:13
Total running time: 39:51
