What are you listening to right now?

[J.D.]

King of Carrot Flowers, Part I. Wish it was longer. Like 10 mins longer.

Yeah, that's probably my favorite on the album. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is probably second.

[Lucky Jim]

Love or hate Pitchfork, this is why it's a worthwhile site:

Neutral Milk Hotel:
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
[Merge; 1998; Merge/Domino; 2005]
Rating: 10.0
Buy it from Insound

Download it from eMusic

So, then, seven years later Domino reissues In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the arguments can begin anew. I've talked about this album with a lot of people, including Pitchfork readers and music writers, and while it is loved in the indie world like few others, a small but still significant number despise it. Aeroplane doesn't have the near-consensus of top-shelf 90s rock artifacts like, say, Loveless, OK Computer, or Slanted and Enchanted. These records are varied, of course, different in many ways. But in one key respect Aeroplane stands apart: This album is not cool.

Shortly after the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Puncture magazine had a cover story on Neutral Milk Hotel. In it Mangum told of the influence on the record of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. He explained that shortly after releasing On Avery Island he read the book for the first time, and found himself completely overwhelmed with sadness and grief. Back in 1998 this admission made my jaw drop. What the hell? A guy in a rock band saying he was emotionally devastated by a book everyone else in America read for a middle-school assignment? I felt embarrassed for him at first, but then, the more I thought about it and the more I heard the record, I was awed. Mangum's honesty on this point, translated directly to his music, turned out to be a source of great power.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a personal album but not in the way you expect. It's not biography. It's a record of images, associations, and threads; no single word describes it so well as the beautiful and overused "kaleidoscope." It has the cracked logic of a dream, beginning with "King of Carrot Flowers Part 1". The easiest song on the record to like on first listen, it quietly introduces the listener to the to the album's world, Mangum singing in a muted voice closer to where he left off with the more restrained On Avery Island (through most of Aeroplane he sounds like he's running out of time and struggling to get everything said). The first four words are so important: "When you were young..." Like every perceptive artist trafficking in memory, Mangum knows dark surrealism to be the language of childhood. At a certain age the leap from kitchen utensils jammed into dad's shoulder to feet encircled by holy rattlesnakes is nothing. A cock of the head; a squint, maybe.

Inside this dream it all begins in the body. Moments of trauma, joy, shame-- here they're all experienced first as physical sensation. A flash of awkward intimacy is recalled as "now how I remember you/ how I would push my fingers through your mouth/ to make those muscles move." Sometimes I hear this line and chuckle. I think of Steve Martin in The Jerk, licking Bernadette Peters' entire face as a sign of affection. Mangum here reflects the age when biological drives outpace the knowledge of what to do with them, a time you're seeing sex in everything ("semen stains the mountaintops") or that sex can be awkward and unintentionally painful ("fingers in the notches of your spine" is not what one usually hopes for in the dark). Obsessed as it is with the textures of the flesh and the physical self as an emotional antenna, listening to Aeroplane sometimes seems to involve more than just your ears.

Then there's the record's disorienting relationship to time. The instrumentation seems plucked randomly from different years in the 20th century: singing saws, Salvation Army horn arrangements, banjo, accordion, pipes. Lyrical references to technology are hard to fix. Anne Frank's lifespan from 1929 to 1945 is perhaps the record's historical center, but the perspective jumps back and forth over centuries, with images and figures sucked from their own age and squirted out somewhere else. When "The King of Carrot Flowers Part 3" mentions "a synthetic flying machine" our minds leap to something like Leonardo da Vinci's 15th Century drawings of his helicopter prototype. The image in "Two-Headed Boy" of a mutant child trapped in a jar of formaldehyde is pulled from Dr. Moreau's industrial age island. The radio play powered by pre-electric pulleys and weights, the nuclear holocaust in the title track. What's it all about? Mangum offers an explanation for these jarring leaps in a line about Anne Frank in "Oh Comely," where he sings, "I know they buried her body with others/ her sister and mother and 500 families/ and will she remember me 50 years later/ I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine." If you can move through time, see, nothing ever really dies.

Seven years it's been, and whether Mangum has had personal trouble or somehow lost his way with music, it's not unreasonable to think that we've heard the last from Neutral Milk Hotel. I hope he does, but he may never pick up the guitar he set down after "Two-Headed Boy Part Two." Even so, we have this album and another very good one, and that to me is serious riches. Amazing to think how it started, how at the core of it all was guts. I keep thinking of "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding," and one of Dylan's truest lines: "If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine." Aeroplane is what happens when you have that knowledge and still take the risk.

Link.

[Lucky Jim]

"Holland 1945" for me, by the way.

[DREKTUNES]

Wow. That did exactly what music journalism is supposed to do - it made me want to hear the record.

Some of the song titles really make me wanna kick something though. And this is coming from someone who owns everything by The Idle Race.

[J.D.]

"Holland 1945" for me, by the way.

That's up there. Really, every song on the album for me is gold so far. I only finished Communist Daughter when I got off the bus and trudged into work, though. I can't wait to get out of here and finish it.

[Malike]

I'm listening to the genius that is Pantera! I feel like putting my foot through my monitor in a rage of musical ecstasy.

[NewMarketSean]

Love or hate Pitchfork, this is why it's a worthwhile site:



Link.

Funny, when it first came out they gave it a 8.7.

[Lucky Jim]

Funny, when it first came out they gave it a 8.7.

Nothing wrong with that. 8.7 is a great score. Time, and room for growth, are what separate 8.7s from 10.0s.

A lot of art that is labeled "classic" on release ends up being simply the effluvium of a cultural moment, with little staying power. It sometimes takes time to really recognize greatness. OK Computer got a 10.0 on release...but it's kind-of an anomaly

(Edited to note: I'm not sure they reviewed it on release in 1997 - but rather in 1999...when even I could've told you it was a 10. Then again, I'd been pimping RH since The Bends and thought OK Computer the best album of the last 15 years. I don't think that now, but I was convinced then).

[DREKTUNES]

Nothing wrong with that. 8.7 is a great score. Time, and room for growth, are what separate 8.7s from 10.0s.

A lot of art that is labeled "classic" on release ends up being simply the effluvium of a cultural moment, with little staying power. It takes time to really recognize greatness.

Have you also experienced the phenomena of disliking (or outright hating) a record at first, only for it to eventually weasel it's way onto your favorites? That was my experience with Queen 2. God, I love that record.

[frankpembleton]

"Holland 1945" for me, by the way.

Absolutely. One of my favorite songs ever.

[Lucky Jim]

Have you also experienced the phenomena of disliking (or outright hating) a record at first, only for it to eventually weasel it's way onto your favorites? That was my experience with Queen 2. God, I love that record.

Rarely anything that I hate. Often - as with Okkervil River's Stage Names - I just don't get into the album on the first or second listen...then...suddenly...later...it all clicks. I love that.

[NewMarketSean]

Rarely anything that I hate. Often - as with Okkervil River's Stage Names - I just don't get into the album on the first or second listen...then...suddenly...later...it all clicks. I love that.

Funny how that happens.

[Lucky Jim]

Funny how that happens.

Sometimes I think it takes time to internalize the universe of an album - so that all of the signs and signifiers and internal reference points are in place for you to get it.

And sometimes it just takes that one song, with that one hook and it unlocks an entire album like a box.

[J.D.]

Sometimes I think it takes time to internalize the universe of an album - so that all of the signs and signifiers and internal reference points are in place for you to get it.

And sometimes it just takes that one song, with that one hook and it unlocks an entire album like a box.

For me, for fear of embarassing myself with some of my musical preferences, the CD that probably comes the closest to that was Full Collapse by Thursday. I loved the first song on the CD, but loathed the rest of the album. Slowly, I started to focus more on the music being played and came around to some of the (admittedly heavy-handed and disjointed) lyrics. It's one of my favorite CDs, even if it too quickly gets thrown into the catch-all "emo" genre. Understanding (In A Car Crash) still reigns as my favorite song. If that's an indictment of my musical taste, so be it.

There are other albums that definitely fall into this category... and bands as well. You all saw how much work it was for me to actually hold an appreciation for The Hold Steady. I like them plenty now, and have most of their albums I downloaded in my rotation.

[DREKTUNES]

For me, for fear of embarassing myself with some of my musical preferences, the CD that probably comes the closest to that was Full Collapse by Thursday. I loved the first song on the CD, but loathed the rest of the album. Slowly, I started to focus more on the music being played and came around to some of the (admittedly heavy-handed and disjointed) lyrics. It's one of my favorite CDs, even if it too quickly gets thrown into the catch-all "emo" genre. Understanding (In A Car Crash) still reigns as my favorite song. If that's an indictment of my musical taste, so be it.

There are other albums that definitely fall into this category... and bands as well. You all saw how much work it was for me to actually hold an appreciation for The Hold Steady. I like them plenty now, and have most of their albums I downloaded in my rotation.

You know, it took me a while to get into the New Pornographers, as I was expecting something harder to get into. They are, of course, wonderfully hooky and welcoming. So I had to try easier.

And we got him into the Hold Steady! Yay, The Internet.