Customer Reviews

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea [Vinyl]

5 star:		(387)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(28)

 

 

Let's pretend, for a moment, that you're listening to Aeroplane for the first time, having heard nothing at all from this alternately praised and despised album. The first thing to notice is the faintly catchy acoustic strumming of "King of Carrot Flowers, part 1". In bursts a slightly nasal voice that was never intended to sing, an odd accompanying wind or brass instrument that strangely matches it, and nonsensical lyrics reminiscent of Syd Barrett but with more sex. Just when you're getting used to this little piece of quirk, Part 2 begins, and a lo-fi electric guitar begins arpeggiating uncertainly. The voice is back, and this time it's nigh-excruciating as singer Jeff Mangum belts out "IIILooooooovveYYOOOOOOOOOUUUUJEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESUSCHRIIIIIIISSSSTT" in a register far above his capacity. At this point, the listener either runs screaming, never to touch the album again, or (and this is the path you follow) s/he "gets the joke" and bursts into fits of laughter; Mangum sure has balls. Aeroplane gets mentally filed into the "Novelty" section.

No sooner do you dismiss this act as a good joke than Neutral Milk Hotel shatters the conception by bursting into the dreadfully catchy and piledriving near-punk of Part 3. As a plethora of sounds and instruments clank and whirr along, the band reveals its ace in the hole, a brass band that brings even more of a mad, carnivalesque tenor to the song. Maybe this band can rock after all, you think, however weirdly. Could they possibly be _serious_?

The final piece to the puzzle comes with the next two songs. The affecting (and affected) "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" is quite possibly the finest piece of music ever recorded involving a musical saw(three-part saw harmonies, no less!), and the surreal lyrics finally coalesce into a theme, as fine a musical take on "carpe diem" as I remember in rock. By the time Two-Headed Boy Part I rolls around, the songwriting's become almost unbearably good, the singing's become almost unbearably strained, and the instruments have just gone nuts. The sense of yearning is palpable, but something odd's going on. Sure, there's the acoustic guitar being played as violently as in any punk song, but is that the brass band shifting into a New Orleans funeral march? Indeed!

The remainder of the album is a kaleidoscope of oddity, pain, love, young sex, Anne Frank, flowers, flames, spines, and death. Rather than being any one of the the things suggested in the previous paragraphs, Neutral Milk Hotel is ALL of them. Mangum is joking lightly and deadly serious, celebratory and mournful, mad and sane, sober and wild. Illustrating the contradiction are the songs that can make me cry even though I couldn't understand the lyrics if my life depended on it. This album encompasses it all, and just when it all seems like it's going to fly apart, the tortured conviction of Mangum's voice and the utter catchiness of the music win out. _Aeroplane..." is a terrific album if you're willing to accept it on its own terms, and I pity anyone who misses out on it; in all the flailing weirdness, it somehow becomes universal.

PS: The voice becomes incredibly endearing after enough listens.

I read a CMJ review of this album sometime last year; I vaguely remembered it, and stored the name in the back of my head. Then a few months later, I saw it listed in about a million top 10 lists for 1998. Then one day I bought it on a whim, having never heard it (something I never do). I guess luck was with me that day.

Though it's futile to describe the music on this record, I'll try. It's an insane mix of distorted bass, horns, saws, theremins, and other strange sounding instruments and a guy who's got one of the most honest voices you'll ever hear. The pace alternates between mostly acoustic ballads (something i usually despise) and caffinated garage rockers. Mind you it all sounds like it was recorded in 1935. It's literally like nothing I've ever heard; and i'm mostly into punk, so this is something i never would have listened to given the description. but hell, good music is good music, and this is some of the best you're likely to find.

Now many people say lead singer/musical genius Jeff Magnum's voice is "unlistenable." It may not be polished, but how many singers out there take vocal lessons? If they did, everyone would sound like Boyz II Men. This man has a voice that makes it sound like he means what he is saying, and it may be an acquired taste, but by no means unlistenable.

This disc is like a punch in the stomach (a good punch); you can feel what Jeff is saying. And that's something that so few musicians are able to do. I own over 500 cds; I've heard every type of music imaginable; and this is right near the top of them all. Believe the hype, the good press, because this album is absolutely amazing.

Jeff Mangum is the King of Carrot Flowers. Or at least, the king of his own brand of innocently psychedelic dream-rock. The second full-length album from the endearingly weird Neutral Milk Hotel is not as lo-fi as "From Avery Island," but its beauty and dreaminess are still untouched.

Steady guitar strums start off "The King of Carrot Flowers Part 1," before blossoming into the eerie, spirituality-themed "King of Carrot Flowers Part 2 & 3." Following it up the somehow inspiring "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea," the grim trumpeting of "The Fool," and the rousing folky-carnival bombast of "Holland, 1945."

Crickets, screams and a gentle guitar melody start "Communist Daughter," followed by the wailing "Oh Comely," magnificently fuzzy "Ghost," and the eerie tenth track, which doesn't have a title -- a catchy, indescribable mix of fuzz guitar and funhouse melodies. The album ends on a strong note with "Two Headed Boy Part 2," with its haunted-house opener woven out of horns, which melts away behind Mangum's final ballad.

Neutral Milk Hotel is one of those bands that will steal your heart, or send you howling from the room. There's no middle ground. It's an acid-tinged dream of spirituality, sex, chaos, rebirth and beauty, full of girls with roses in their eyes and ghosts flying over stormy cities.

The music tends to be of two types. On one hand, we have Mangum's laid-back folky ballads; they are sometimes laced with other instruments, but the core is his acoustic guitar and his off-kilter voice. And then there are the swirling panoramas of brass-band, fuzz guitar, accordians, white noise, organ and musical saw, among others. These bizarre melodies are entrancing, almost hypnotic, and the catchier ones sound like the soundtrack of a carnival.

Mangum's voice is a weird one. It isn't very good, and he can't hold the notes (his wail of "I loooove you Jeeesusss Chrrriiiisst" is outrageously funny). But it meshes into the music as if his vocals were tailor-made for it. And the lyrics are full of weird things that somehow strike a chord in the listener, as if Mangum has tapped into your strangest dreams, ranging from the childlike wonder of "King of Carrot Flowers Parts 2 & 3" to the wistful: "Now she's a little boy in Spain/Playing pianos filled with flames/On empty rings around the sun/All sing to say my dream has come..."

Full of psychedelic brass bands and folky songs about children with wings, Neutral Milk Hotel's second album is a rare, magnificent album without a single unworthy song. Beautiful, strange and wondrous.

I had to buy a second copy of this CD.

One day, as I was leaving work, my original copy of the CD broke open its jewel case and leapt forth in a daring and quixotic bid for freedom which was cut tragically short when it skidded to a stop, butter-side down, on the rough pavement of the parking lot.

In retrospect, given the nature of this CD, I was not surprised that it had made the attempt; indeed, the only surprise is that it did not succeed, and rise up into the distance to sail the endless skies forever.

Relocating to Athens, Ga, the Elephant 6 member Neutral Milk Hotel (fronted by Louisiana prodigy Jeff Mangum) has found the perfect outlet for their powerful brand of fuzzbox power-folk. Following up their debut "On Avery Island," "Aeroplane" is a masterpiece of songwriting, combining a host of bizarre instruments (including the saw) and distorted blasts of electric guitar with sugary-sweet pop melodies and transcendental lyrics that are so abstract they make Michael Stipe look coherent. Mangum's charmingly off-key crooning matches the earnest soul-searching belted out by acoustic guitar in such numbers as "Two Headed Boy" and "Communist Daughter." And for pure rock ecstasy, "Holland, 1945" may be the most exciting burst of sonic orgasma produced in years.

It's rare that a lyricist can emote such a range of feelings on a 35-minute record with the clarity and energy Mangum can. "Holland" is about Anne Frank, and lines like "And then they buried her alive / One evening 1945 / With just her sister at her side/ And only weeks before the guns / All came and rained on everyone" contrast sharply with the sunny melody of the guitar.

Mangum's unconventional views on romance and sex bleed into ambiguous gendering and dream-like love affairs. Consider the phrases "This is the room one afternoon I knew I would love you and from above you how I sank into your soul" and "Your dad would throw the garbage all across the floor as we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for." Mangum hits on details that poingnantly underscore his overall message. He overcomes trite existentialism with life-affirming aphorisms buried in poetry such as "And one day we will die and our ashes will fly / From the aeroplane over the sea / But for now we are young, let us lay in the sun / And count every beautiful thing we can see." Having the courage to rhyme with innocent boyishness makes his mature ironies all the more affecting. In "Two Headed Boy, Part 2," Mangum settles on the prettiest chord resolution to voice the sadness of his desires: "In my dreams you're alive and you're crying." And as the album ends on that song, NMH's confident musicianship comes across like courageousness and sly humor all at once. If Phil Spector knew his wall of sound has now extended to grass-roots power-folk, he might want to come out of retirement to hear the surging production on this album. It's as if no level of feedback is strong enough to muffle Mangum's artistry.

Neutral Milk Hotel's sound is far from mainstream, so don't judge their talent on their record sales. But based completely on emotional resonance, "Aeroplane" is the best album of the year and also the most original.

If you dig the wild sounds of "Aeroplane," definitely check out their first effort, the Jeff Mangum solo effort "On Avery Island," and other Elephant 6 artists like The Apples In Stereo and Olivia Tremor Control. Although the bands are on different labels (NMH are on Merge), they all hail from the same town and split off into different projects (Apples frontman Robert Schneider takes on producing duties for NMH).

I was able to, ahem, OBTAIN all of the songs from this album, with the exception of "two-headed boy pt. 2" several months ago from a now-defunct (essentially) website. I'm not in the habit of music piracy, but all I'd ever heard from this band were the 30 second tidbits above and they sounded intriguing, but awfully STRANGE. I didn't want to throw 15 bucks at something I was going to listen to once. That being said, I just bought this CD just to obtain that one last song, after buying "on Avery Island" and some bootlegged live recordings. This is simply one of the strangest, catchiest, smartest, and most beautiful albums you'll ever hear. Most psychodelic music that I have heard is strange and abstract to the point of being boring or unlistenable; this album manages to meld strong emotional themes out of fantastical lyrics. The best example of this is undoubtly "Oh Comely", which builds in intensity and pure dread out of lyrics like "soft silly music is meaningful, magical... the movements were beautiful, all in your ovaries..." and ends with probably the most crushing final line I've ever heard. It's imagery on par with faulkner, and I don't give that compliment lightly. Yet this is not an album just for "lyric nerds" like myself; the soul of the album is pure, raw emotion. I won't waste time and review space to harp on the common "why do people listen *N'Sync when this is out there?". The plain fact is that many people are not going to "get" this album, and not because they're dumb, but because they look for something out of music that this doesn't give them, and there are things that it won't, like a crystalline singing voice or, frankly, uplifting themes. But I still suggest that everyone check it out, because for that one person out of ten who will be into it, it will be nothing less than life-altering. Yes, I paid 16 bucks for one song. And it was worth every penny.

Pop Kulcher Review: While some albums jump out and grab you on first listen, this one took a few tries before I was even sure I liked it. By the third or fourth spin, though, I found myself unable to put it down, and wound up listening every day for two straight weeks -- something I can't say about any other album in recent memory. Actually, I can't say that about any other album I own, and I own well over 1,500 albums. Like the other bands in the loose "Elephant Six" collective (Apples in Stereo, Olivia Tremor Control, Beulah), Neutral Milk Hotel shares an affinity for the musical textures and experimentalism of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper and the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, and the lyrical adventurism of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde. But NMH tones down the full-tilt studio wizardry of the Apples and OTC, sticking largely with folky acoustic guitars with occasional blasts of distorted-out-the-wazoo wall-of-sound guitars and, more interestingly, a bizarre array of circus-like brass instruments and organs. While the haunting melodies and instrumental adventurism are interesting, it is the album's lyrical content that makes it so memorable. Most songs are poetic, disturbing, and intensely personal ruminations on life and death, both held in equal awe. The album's highlight is undoubtedly "Holland 1945," frenetic, thrashing guitars topped with lyrics depicting death and genocide -- presumably the first rock song to conjure up memories of the Holocaust. It may be one of the most moving post-punk songs ever, kicking off with the lyrics:

"The only girl I've ever loved/was born with roses in her eyes/but then they buried her alive/one evening 1945/with just her sister at her side/and only weeks before the guns/all came and rained on everyone."

We're not talking Mariah Carey here. Some aspects of the album may turn off more casual listeners; the vocals are comparable to other deranged geniuses (like Syd Barrett, Chris Knox, or Daniel Johnston), leading to an occasionally cloying whine; and some of the slower, dirge-like tunes take some diligence to get through. But if you're willing to give this a chance, it may very well blow you away.

Any talk of Elephant 6 invariably involves references to The Beatles and The Beach Boys, so obvious is their influence upon bands such as Olivia Tremor Control and Apples In Stereo. Neutral Milk Hotel share their love of melody, harmony and experimentalism, but go off into an altogether more wonderful direction, sounding in turns like Bob Dylan or Nirvana.

Quite simply, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is a perfect album, essential and addictive. Jeff Mangum has the kind of voice that resonates so beautifully and implores so desperately that it's impossible not to be moved by his strange fairytale narratives and dark secrets. The themes that run through all the songs, and the way the sound ebbs and flows, bring you right back to the beginning once the 40 minutes of the album are over. Warning: you will listen to this on repeat play and the songs will be spinning around your head for weeks.

'Holland, 1945' and 'Ghost' are in a similar vein to the thrilling 'Song Against Sex' from On Avery Island, but with more layers of brass, more harmonies and more energy. However, the fuzz and muddy 'closet' sound of NMH's first album are largely replaced by eerie, otherworldly sounds and stark acoustic narratives. The twin parts of 'Two-Headed Boy' and the meandering 'Oh Comely' are especially simple and affecting, weaving images and emotions like delicate tapestries.

The three parts of 'The King of Carrot Flowers' mutate from the catchy and joyous first part, through the yearning cry of "I love you Jesus Christ!" in part two, to the hurtling finale of part three, caught up in the "waves and undertow". The title track is perfect folk-pop ("How strange it is to be anything at all"). The two instrumentals, 'The Fool' and the untitled tenth track, add to the exultant but disorientating atmosphere, and the lyrics veer from impressions of digust at humanity to an unstoppable hope.

All the songs are just great, the artwork is superb, and I can't express how happy this record makes me.

BUY IT NOW.

This album ABSOLUTELY BLOWS . . . in the ears of sad, soulless, empty human beings.

I'm sorry for that guy.

He can probably tell you a LOT about notes and chords.

He can probably tell you a LOT about music history.

I doubt he can tell you ANYTHING about the heart.

This album can tell you pretty much everything about it.

That's what you can hear someone in the studio shouting as Jeff Mangum finishes the centerpiece of this album, 'Oh Comely'. That pretty much sums up what I feel too. This is one of those albums that hits you like a ton of bricks. If you're here you probably already have a good idea of what NMH sounds like (Elephant 6 and all that) but what you might not know if you haven't heard the album is that Magnum is -much- better than his E6 counterparts.

While some of his friends in bands like Apples (In Stereo) or Olivia Tremor Control dabbled in pretensious sound collages or 60's throwback songs, Magnum released one of the classic albums of the '90s. It's a collection of arresting solo accoustic songs and horn-filled "fuzz folk" tunes. Sounds wierd I know. But the strange thing is how well the diverse sounds of this album flow together. A quiet accoustic number like "2-Headed Boy" flows into a beautiful horn instrumental which morphs into the up-tempo lo-fi masterpiece "Holland, 1945."

The lyrics hold everything together. Mangum has created something resembling a theme album revolving around World War II, Anne Frank and his own childhood. You get the feeling that this guy has a tenous grasp of reality, since the two subjects seem to blend together in his mind. The songs, taken as a whole, evoke a feel of dreamlike sadness. And if you're reading this thinking, "Ugh, a concept album about Anne Frank, how pretensious" it really isn't. Jeff is so heartfelt and honest, but not in an 'emo' way -- no weepy self-pity here. It's hard to believe an album of such maturity and honesty came from a man in his mid 20s.

I know I'm rambling here but there's a lot I have to say about this album. It's not all good. People tend to overreact about "Aeroplane", I think because they feel such a strong emotional connection to Jeff's lyrics. Even though the things he sings about are very cryptic and surreal, you feel empathy and unity with the guy. But this often makes exaggerate how good it is. "Aeroplane" is not the best album of the 90's, Jeff Mangum is not the best musician today. That said, it's still an almost unbelievably emotionally arresting and intimate collection of songs that retain an E6 style accessability and catchiness. Be prepared for this album to effect your mood and also your musical taste. When I first bought it it was the only thing I listened to for at least a week. I'm stunned that this album just came out of the wood-work. While it might not be the best album of the '90's, its definitely one of the most interesting. Everyone who likes music should own it.