Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)

Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

There are few albums where you can look back on the very first time you listened to them with the precision and clarity of the first exposure. Albums become distorted and warped in your mind the more you listen to them and with every listen they grow or wain in your understanding. Songs that you loved the first time begin to fall apart under heavy scrutiny and the songs that paled in comparison begin to share their intricacies once you hear them more clearly. For me, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, embodies this duality more than most albums I can remember listening to for the first time. Back in 2011, I was driving back to Chicago from Milwaukee after a Portugal. The Man show of all things. The girl I was with had fallen asleep in the passenger seat and being alone with nothing to think about but the next hour or so I had on the highway; I played an album I had just downloaded off my iPod Classic. The album was nice enough and I enjoyed the drive, listening to the lyrics and trying to decipher the point of this increasingly strange singer. But of everything I heard, one track: “Oh Comely”, stood above the rest, it was the only song that really made an impact and it produced a sinking feeling of impending seriousness that I can still hear every time I flip the record and drop the needle on the second side. Other songs followed suit growing in appreciation with every listen, eventually coming into their own. “Communist Daughter”, “Two-Headed Boy”/ “The Fool”, “King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 2” all developed into different memories and microcosms that tell a part of the whole story. The album is rich with symbolism, combining images of desolate, war-addled Europe with grotesque circus characters and something about time travel? The almost superfluous and extremely specific imagery is what sets apart Neutral Milk Hotel from the other members of the Elephant Six collective. It's what most people think of when they think of the band (besides that album cover) and it helps give those biting lyrics a sort of dark southern gothic mythology that is so uniquely American, even if its subjects aren't. This is the reason why people come back to this album over an over, it's not the virtuosic and eccentric instrumentation and it's not their cult status, it's the nuance of the music that can mean so much to so many different people in completely different ways. People see and hear what they want in Jeff Mangum's scratchy squealing; they hear a tortured genius, a distorted account of the tragedy of Anne Frank, or maybe they hear a man yelling about something vaguely angsty in the same way they wish they could yell about their own angst. It doesn't matter, it's not the kind of album that has to mean anything specific, not in the same way as say, The Suburbs.

I was able to see Neutral Milk Hotel three times on their 2014-15 tour and at a time when a good friend of mine had just begun to listen to them. His discovery reminded me of the first times I had listened to In the Aeroplane and through him I was able to relive and reassess the joy of those premature listens. Nowadays, In the Aeroplane, is an extremely nostalgic listen, one that evokes Phish covers and television finales that I’ve seen over the years, but also the summers of my youth and a specifically a very close friendship that I developed in my early twenties. It’s an album that’s hard for me to be objective about, but an album that has had the same effect on nearly everyone I know who’s heard it.

~10