Neutral Milk Hotel still moving after 10 years
When I was growing up, I never had a cool older brother to introduce me to hip music. I did have an older sister that I would sometimes steal Alanis Morrisett and Cranberries albums from to listen to secretly at night, but I wasn’t one of those kids who was listening to Sonic Youth in grade school. This means when Neutral Milk Hotel released “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” in February of 1998, I had no idea it existed – I was still trying to figure out the lyrics to the last Wallflowers single. I did, however, see the name “Neutral Milk Hotel” in a snowboarding magazine, and it stuck inside my head until several years later, when I finally purchased “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” I would describe “Aeroplane” as both a gateway record and as a musical barometer of sorts. It’s weird enough to put off a large portion of the population, but if you let it start to burrow inside your head, all kinds of musical horizons will open up for you. Lauded by critics immediately after its release, “Aeroplane” springs from the fertile mind of singer-songwriter Jeff Magnum, a place where Anne Frank is the subject of intensely personal love songs and where the mood veers from sublime to unsettling within milliseconds. Magnum was a pioneer of the so-called “Fuzz-folk” genre, and here he deftly mixes energetically strummed acoustic guitar with singing saws, trumpets, accordion, zanzithophone, flugelhorn, organ, bowed banjos and gloriously fuzzed-out guitars into a confusing, dark and thrilling 39 minutes of music. Although the sounds vary from place to place as the album progresses, Magnum lets his most powerful musical weapon, his voice, take on the burden of expression. Throughout the album, Magnum routinely reaches for notes his voice just can’t produce, creating a pathos that fairly well devastates in what could be considered the standout tracks, “Two Headed Boy” (parts I and II). Magnum’s singing style has been extraordinarily influential and can clearly be heard in “Win Butler” from Arcade Fire and “Connor Oberst” from Bright Eyes, just to name a few of many.
The narrative thrust of “Aeroplane” is cloudy at best, but it does concern Anne Frank (Magnum sings about “Anne’s ghost all around,” and “Holland, 1945” deals with her death and how he wishes he could “save her in some sort of time machine”), and most of the imagery centers around familiar and matrimonial bonds. Magnum describes a fight between parents in “The King of Carrot Flowers, PT I” as, “… your mom would stick a fork right into daddy’s shoulder, and Dad would throw garbage all across the floor, as we would lay and learn what each others’ bodies were for.”
Taken as individual songs, the tracks here would represent only fractured ideas and vague hypotheses, but as a whole (complete with a few instrumental tracks), the album wields an emotional heft that has carried it to the forefront of the most influential indie albums of the past decade. “Aeroplane” was a sort of second wind for the independent music scene, and it’s hard to imagine Death Cab For Cutie, or any other such band, having the success they enjoy today without Jeff Magnum’s cross pollination of folk, rock and aspects of world and ambient music. Ten years after its release, “In The Aeroplane Over the Sea” is still managing to influence those who take the time to listen.
Grade A