Review Summary: Personal revelations on the greatest album ever.
For the longest type, I didn’t get the hype behind this album. It was enjoyable, but it didn’t hit anything deeper than surface level. On the other hand, maybe I was too immature, breezing through music with swiftness comparable to middle school crushes, shallow and inadequate. I rarely let songs sink in. Anyways, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea remained buried in my library with dozens of other literary deep albums that I left relatively untouched.
I remember I was driving back to school when the album shuffled on. It was “Two-Headed Boy” and I listened to it once. Then twice. Then I pulled over and listened to the entire album watching the rain melt into my windshield. I probably melted there as well, letting my body evaporate away into the atmosphere. The album still blows me out of the water. I have spent the last two years listening to it daily, now possessing the meaningless talent of being able to write all the lyrics on scraps of paper littering my college campus.
Jeff Mangum possesses a rare ability to collide his personal opinions into layers upon layers of dense lyrical genius. I honestly can interpret each Aeroplane song differently depending on my mood and surroundings. The album opens with “King of Carrot Flowers Part I,” a light, hearted tune about growing up and falling in love, yet it is cloaked with a dark cloud of reality and throwing cutlery around the house. Again, dissect it whichever way you want, you may end up dancing your feet off or crying in a corner. Mangum gives you the wheel for the rest of the album during this song, providing a beautifully crafted vehicle to take you wherever you want to go. Each song is a stratified blanket of physical sensation like “placing fingers through the notches in your spine” (“Two-Headed Boy”) to emotional anguish like “the world just screams and falls apart” (“Holland, 1945”). Just typing about it sends chills across my body.
If you love this album, I can only hope you feel your soul seep into each shaky word. If you don’t, take another listen, you could be surprised what you find.
“I will be with you when you lose your breath/ chasing the only/meaningful memory you thought you had left” -Oh Comely, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea.
