Album of the Week: Neutral Milk Hotel- In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Though we've all probably experienced deja vu, there are actually three types of deja vu. One of which is called deja vecu, which is, apparently, what most people mean when they say "woah, deja vu!!": that feeling that you've experienced or done something before, and possibly, too, that you know exactly what you're supposed to say or do next.

Sometimes, while listening to albums for the first time, I feel that sense of deja vu. It's as if I have listened to it before, somehow, because it seems so familiar and yet there's no way it should be--I don't mean music that is predictable or trite, I mean new music I've never heard before, or heard anything like it. I can practically 'feel' or 'guess' what the next song or line will be like; it's strange and surreal at the same time. How appropriate, then, that one of the first times I remember having musical deja vecu was when I listened to In The Aeroplane Over The Sea for the first time.

Revisionists have been quick to declare the album an instant classic and a landmark piece of music, but the truth is it wasn't reviewed as such on its release. Even the now overly enthusiastic Pitchfork Media originally gave it a 8.7 out of 10: not a bad score by any means, but not exactly perfect, either. However, I do remember hearing about the album a year or two after its release. Someone mentioned that The Glow pt. 2 by the Microphones sounded a bit like it, and so I found myself in a record store trying to decide between the two. I went with the Microphones album, and had mostly forgotten about Neutral Milk Hotel until college, when a girlfriend had it in her collection and insisted I had to listen to it.

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea has that peculiar ability to sound familiar and yet totally foreign. It's the same way that Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, Bitches Brew by Miles Davis, and The White Album have a unique and odd feeling to them, at once familiar and totally foreign. In short, "uncanny" in the literal sense of the word. They sound eerie and strange, created by people who's work you're familiar with, and yet there's some intangible element at play that seems to go beyond known scientific, logical reality. To me, albums like these are complete masterpieces that somehow transcend both the people who recorded them and their intentions for the finished product.

This album has always been particularly uncanny to me both for the way it sounds and the way it keeps popping up in my life. Though the album is, at its basic level, a singer/songwriter/folk concept piece vaguely based on the emotional response Jeff Magnum had to reading about Anne Frank, it has an unique mix of instruments and Magnum's bizarre voice to put a wholly original spin on things. Utilizing such odd instruments as shortwave radio, singing saw, bowed banjo, accordion, zanzithophone, and bagpipes, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea has a vaguely Eastern European ethnic world music sound mixed with American indie rock lo-fi folk. Then there's Magnum's voice, which you'll either love or hate--nasally, always stretching for notes, strangled, pained, and ultimately, as transcendent and beautiful as the music itself. David Berman of the Silver Jews once sang "all my favorite singers couldn't sing", and that about sums it up.

Strangest of all is the way the album keeps recurring in my life. After first reading about it, and hearing the comparison to The Glow pt. 2, I would occasionally see it mentioned on message boards by people who said it was a must hear album. Then, after hearing it via my girlfriend, I was at a party once and happened to hear something familiar playing in one of the apartment's bedrooms. It's one of those times where your body physically notices some familiar thing before you consciously do--you stop and look around and think to yourself "wait, I know this song...it's....it's..." Sure enough, one of the girls who lived there had her iTunes on shuffle and 'Two-Headed Boy' was playing. About a year later, I heard a song from the album playing on the college's radio station after I broke up with the girlfriend who introduced me to it. Just recently, someone sent me a mix CD with a non-Aeroplane Neutral Milk Hotel song on it.

As for the music itself, well, it's amazing. Though build upon Jeff Magnum's rock solid acoustic guitar strumming, the songs take on all sorts of weird sounds and textures--witness the title track, which adds booming bass, light handed drumming, a flugelhorn solo, wailing siren somethings, and I don't even know what else. Similarly, the lyrics are as unhinged and skewed as the music and famous album cover. I'm sure that most people who listen to the album think the lyrics are nonsense garbage, but they do something to me that I can't put into words; in short, they're as uncanny and familiar/foreign as the music. The lyrics are highly poetic and very bodily oriented: there are all sorts of mentions of the body and its processes, and somehow even as odd as it all is, it captures what it's like to be human and, actually, to be in love. The final track, 'Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two' has always been particularly gripping to me, the way it harkens back to the first 'Two-Headed Boy' and wraps up the album on a devastatingly bittersweet note:

"And when we break, we'll wait for our miracle
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies
God is a place you will wait the rest of your life
Two headed boy she is all you could need
she will feed you tomatoes and radio wires
and retire to sheets safe and clean
but don't hate her when she gets up to leave"

Sometimes I wonder if people get bogged down in all the minutiae of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. I do find myself wondering if everyone would feel the same about the album if Jeff Magnum had released anything in the past 10 years. I mean, what if OK Computer was Radiohead's second album and they had disappeared for 10 years: would that effect your opinion and love for that album any?? I'd like to think not. Many bands have released albums after their masterpiece but we all still rate those masterpieces as their best...but, you never know. I mean, where could you really go from In The Aeroplane Over The Sea?? But I digress. Don't read about this album anymore. Don't dissect it, figure out exactly what every song means, what every sound you hear is played by, and so forth. Just get a copy, listen to it, and let one of the most spellbinding and brilliant albums of the 90s wash over you.