Jeff Magnum's Neutral Milk Hotel

Review of the Indie Rock Album In the Aeroplane over the Sea

Jan 20, 2008

The final statement the world has from Neutral Milk Hotel is In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It's surely a huge statement, but what it's saying might be anyone's guess.

“Know all your enemies/ We know who our enemies are,” sings Jeff Mangum on “Oh Comely,” the 8th track on Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The brainchild of Mangum, the release also featured an underrated band that included Scott Spillane, Jeremy Barnes, and Julian Koster, as well as a few session players.

The songs, which were almost all written by Mangum, are dexterous, comprised of elegiac thrills and bucolic dreams, rising out of the slag of the mung heap into a sort of postmodern malaise that celebrates life with equal parts innocence and complicity. Mangum’s writing is accessible yet mystifying, and he belongs in a rarefied stratum of songwriters, spitting his words with rapid-fire intensity like a young Dylan or Van Morrison.

Analysis

Opening with a soft, catchy riff, played loudly like somebody’s pressing too hard on the strings, Mangum sings: “This is the room one afternoon I knew I could love you/ And from above you, how I sank into your soul.” As statements, “The King of Carrot Flowers Pts. 1-3” (as tracks 1 and 2) are nice and simple, being general introductions to the ambiguity to come. The titular “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” finds joy, abandoned in childlike infatuation, while “Two-Headed Boy” is all loss and self-reproachful gloom.

An extended vocalization by Mangum fades out “Two-Headed Boy,” as it segues into “The Fool,” which showcases a musical saw. This is the first instrumental, as the fifth track, and it closes the first half of the album, leading into “Holland, 1945.”

“The only girl I’ve ever loved/ Was born with roses in her eyes” are the lyrics which kick off “Holland, 1945,” a bright and bubbly circus picture song. It is a blistering exposition, alternating accusation with wistful longing, before riding out on distortion into the brief detour of “The Communist Daughter,” a troubling and perplexing number that runs under two minutes.

Non sequitur chronologies and free-association imagery dominate Aeroplane, but on “Oh Comely” these qualities are magnified into monuments. Pretty and terrible scenes occupy the feral, incongruent landscape, where “your father made fetuses with flesh-licking ladies.” Themes of reincarnation appear both here and on “Ghost,” both as metaphor and literal fact, with allegorical implications, too: “And now she knows she’ll never be afraid/ To watch the morning paper blow into a hole where no one can escape.”

The roaring end of “Ghost” anticipates the spectral instrumental tenth track, which is untitled. Uilleann pipes dance, and the jam between the guitars and drums is festive. The second half of the story comes to a close with this instrumental, leaving only a finale, which is ushered in on an ethereal whirl.

“Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2” is the best song on the album, full of rotating perspectives and frightening pictures. Mangum’s voice overflows with fervor, peaking with the fluid declaration, “And when we break, we’ll wait for our miracle/ God is a place where some holy spectacle lies.” The final verse is flush with ideas, sounding not as the end of the album but rather an ellipsis, something to be cycled or repeated: “Two-headed boy/ She is all you could need…/ But don’t hate her when she gets up to leave.”

Conclusion

In the tremulous procession, gathering momentum in thematic presence, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea proves its salt in redeeming ways. It is a lament at the laconic luridness of life, whilst celebrating the tectonic caterwaul in ostentatious badinage over historical figures and personal experiences. It transcends itself, as the figures change, subterfuge displaces irony, and snide hipster fire dies in insistent zeal – Aeroplane travels a broad path, cutting a swath through religious ideologies and philosophical paradoxes; it tempts the listener into excision, into pain so deep and perpetual that it can be, at the same time, quixotic and cynical. Aeroplane is a work of immense pain, not because of the hardship of life, but rather the sometimes overwhelming sense of melancholic joy that accompanies loss and epiphany.

Surprisingly, it all blends together into something that is more than just listenable. Like a good novel or movie, it can even be lived vicariously through, as one of those few albums that is as accessible as it is good. Horns flare out frequently, picking up what would otherwise be lulls, and the overlaying of guitars and double-tracking of vocals make for a beautiful work, suitable for anybody’s sonic palette.

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