one of my favorite records turns 20 today – here is something i wrote about it for a college class in 2014
In late 2009, I took a trip overseas with my parents and older brother. Being the anxious flyer that I was (and am), my travel routine usually involved a Xanax, one or more bottles of NyQuil, and a few new albums I’d never heard freshly downloaded onto my 2nd Generation iPod Touch.
Before this particular flight I texted my best friend from high school, whose taste in obscure and beautiful music I seriously envied, and asked for recommendations for the long flight ahead. “There’s always In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” he replied in his style of dad-joke, earning a flat “lol” from me. But I looked it up and downloaded it anyway.
Released in 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is one of those records you’re not really sure if you like on first listen. You’re not sure where it’s going at times, what the band is trying to do – nor can you quite tell if Jeff Mangum’s singing is bad, or if it’s so bad that it’s actually good.
It’s also one of those records that you know, by the time it’s over, is a critical puzzle piece that’s been missing from your listening. If you’re coming to it as late as I was, over a decade after its release, you’re a little embarrassed you didn’t hear it sooner. Aeroplane is an odd but powerful statement – Mangum’s lyrics, sung with untrained but self-assured gusto, are beautifully and meticulously crafted. Every word is deliberately chosen to paint yellowed pictures of childlike wonder and innocence faced with the darkness and uncertainty of the world at large. Sometimes the imagery is clear; sometimes it’s impossible to decipher. But when you hear Jeff Mangum sing, one thing is painfully obvious: whatever he’s talking about, he fucking means it.
The rest of the band believes it too – multi-instrumentalist Julian Koster, brass player Scott Spillane, and drummer Jeremy Barnes play these songs with unrivaled intensity. Like Mangum, they’re not the most technically gifted group of musicians. Tempos jump and jerk inconsistently, and there are plenty of sour notes to go around. But also like Mangum, the band expresses itself with such fierce energy that you worry someone in the studio might have gotten injured by a pumped-up player thrashing about.
Neutral Milk Hotel began in 1989 as Jeff Mangum’s solo project. From an early age, the Ruston, Louisiana native was recording his own songs on an (even then) ancient 4-track tape machine. He would often appear on his friends’ home recording projects as well. He and his tight-knit group of friends – Will Cullen Hart, Bill Doss, and Robert Schneider (who would later produce both Neutral Milk Hotel albums) – would play in each other’s various bands and one-off endeavors. Much later, they would from the music collective Elephant 6. After high school, Mangum, Hart, and Doss moved from Ruston to Athens, Georgia – then a cultural hot-spot for the young and hip. Mangum found moderate success as a frequent contributor to Hart and Doss’ band Olivia Tremor Control, but soon after traveled to Denver to record Neutral Milk Hotel’s first full-length record with Robert Schneider.
That record, titled On Avery Island, was released on Merge Records in 1996. Wild and chaotic, it sounds like everything on it was recorded through a thick layer of fuzz – which was almost always the case. Those who heard it admired the profound rawness of both Mangum’s performances and the production and arrangements, but outside of his small Athens community of weirdos, not many people knew about it. It was Merge’s expectation that Mangum would support the album with a tour, but since he had no band there was no way to make it happen. Still, he spent years travelling alone across the US, playing songs from Avery to whoever would listen. He was frequently unemployed, bumming around on friends’ couches and in their closets. Mangum finally ended up in New York City, where he met musicians Koster, Spillane, and Barnes. It wasn’t until he brought them back with him to Athens that Neutral Milk Hotel became a band in the truest sense of the word.
Freshly inspired by his new collaborators, Jeff Mangum immediately got to work writing On Avery Island’s follow-up. He travelled to Denver to work with Robert Schneider once again, taking his band with him to record what would become In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Mangum and Schneider knew they wanted to keep the coats of fuzz from On Avery Island, but this time they went about it a little differently. While Avery’s guitars and bass (as well as many of the vocals and horns) were recorded through Big Muff guitar pedals or other forms of effect distortion, this time they manufactured their own fuzz sound by close-miccing the instruments, cranking the preamps (often running elements through the tube circuitry multiple times) pushing the outputs of the outboard compressors, and then finally turning up the input of the tape machine. Each stage of this signal chain would normally only cause a little bit of harmonic distortion, but every step together added up to an enormously warm, rich fuzz sound. This cocktail of studio harmonic distortion is most noticeable on the guitars, bass, and drums, but it makes the vocal and horns cut through as well.
The arrangements on these new songs, figured out in bits and pieces by Mangum, Schneider, and horn player Spillane, are exceptional. Though Mangum’s strained but strong performances are more than enough to carry solo acoustic tracks Two-Headed Boy and Oh Comely, the rest of the band adds an exciting, chaotic depth. Upbeat, punk-rock thrashers like King of Carrot Flowers Pts. 2 & 3 and Holland, 1945 fill you with surges of mysterious, raw energy; and then the sleepy waltz of title track In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and muted tape-delay head-trip Communist’s Daughter either calm your racing heart or suspend it in frozen disbelief.
One of my favorite things about this record is the variation in instrumentation track to track. Mangum and his hyper-compressed acoustic guitar are clearly the centerpieces of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, but crunchy drums and bass, spaghetti-western brass arrangements, air organ, bowed banjo, singing saws, uillean pipes, zanzithophone (I had to Google that one), and music concréte tape loops make appearances across the album like a revolving cast of characters in some bizarro circus-theater piece. On one level, it’s complete sonic chaos. On another, each individual element gives and takes and compromises with everything else, and achieves a true sense of balance.
Aeroplane is as elaborate lyrically as it is instrumentally; it’s difficult to suss out exactly what Jeff Mangum is talking about at any given time. There are images of infancy throughout the record, such as King of Carrot Flowers Pts. 2 & 3: “I will float until I learn how to swim … I will spit until I learn how to speak … I will shout until they know what I mean.” There also seems to be a distinct storyline of conjoined twins weaving its way through the whole record – “But now we move to feel/For ourselves in some stranger’s stomach … Let your skin begin to blend itself with mine,” he crows in Oh Comely. There’s even a song called Two-Headed Boy – the verses show these supposed twins thriving in each other’s company (“Dance round the room to accordion keys/With the needle that sings in your heart”) while the chorus details a surgical procedure meant to separate the twins but killing one instead (“And they’ll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine/And when all is breaking/Everything that you could keep inside/Now your eyes ain’t moving, now/They just lay there in their climb”).
Fans of the record also speculate about another theme of Aeroplane’s: the story of Anne Frank (1929-1945). Most of the lyrics (and even the title) of Holland, 1945 point to her: “The only girl I’ve ever loved/Was born with roses in her eyes/But then they buried her alive/One evening in 1945/With just her sister at her side/And only weeks before the guns/All came and rained in everyone.” In the Aeroplane Over the Sea mentions an Anna, whose “ghost [is] all around,” and a line in Ghost talks about a girl “born in a bottle rocket, 1929.”
It’s easy to argue that Anne Frank has at least some sort of role within Mangum’s weird, winding narrative, but how she relates to the story of the conjoined twins is a mystery I’m not likely to ever solve. The friend who recommended In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has a theory that Frank was reincarnated as the narrator’s conjoined twin sister. Holland, 1945 goes on to hint at rebirth through death (“Now she’s a little boy in Spain/Playing pianos filled with flames”), as does the song Ghost (“Ghost, ghost, I know you live within me/I feel you as you fly/In thunder clouds above the city/Into one that I love”).
The pieces are there, but does it make sense? Writing a concept album about Anne Frank being reincarnated into a conjoined twin does seem pretty… batshit. But Jeff Mangum has a story to tell here, whatever it is, and he tells it with alarming urgency.
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was released on Merge Records in early 1998. Reception was mixed at first; many reviewers were put off by Mangum’s untrained voice and confusing storytelling. It didn’t sell well at first either – Merge projected sales of just 5,500 CDs and 1,600 LPs. But over time, the record has become an indie cult classic, selling well over 300,000 copies since its release. Reviews became more and more positive; it’s received perfect or near-perfect scores from the likes of Pitchfork and Rolling Stone. More recent journalists have praised Aeroplane for its cinematic lyrical landscapes and warm, lo-fi production style.
Neutral Milk Hotel – now a full band – went on tour for almost two years straight to support the record. They traveled back and forth across the United States several times, and even went to Europe on a couple occasions. People were starting to pay attention to them. Then, after they had built up so much momentum, Jeff Mangum called it quits. Worn out and subject to severe anxiety, he was in poor health. According to his longtime girlfriend and occasional Neutral Milk Hotel bandmate Laura Carter, he felt guilty for wanting out, since he had brought his friends along with him for the ride and given them a real sense of purpose and belonging (they were starting to earn decent money, as well). He didn’t know how to tell them that he couldn’t do it anymore, so he avoided them and became reclusive. He’d play one or two more solo shows here and there at the dawn of the millennium, but other than that it seemed like Neutral Milk Hotel was done.
Then, out of nowhere, Mangum toured the East Coast in 2011, performing solo with an acoustic guitar. This tour continued into 2012 and 2013, including performances at Coachella, Primavera Sound, and the Calgary Folk Music Festival. Neutral Milk Hotel conducted a reunion tour in 2013 and 2014, playing across the world in Taiwan, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and Europe. Neutral Milk Hotel has announced even more shows for 2015.
My friend and I got to see them perform at Prospect Park this summer. Horn player Scott Spillane walked out on stage before the band, requesting that people refrain from photographing them during their set. Jeff Mangum finally came out thirty minutes after the show was supposed to start and addressed the crowd: “I’m really sorry, guys, I had to do some OCD rituals and go back and forth through the door a couple times.”
He started the show by himself, band members coming onstage one by one to accompany him. It was a mindblowing show – the energy of the performances matched and even exceeded what was on the record. Songs would alternate between descending punk-rock chaos, with Julian Koster aimlessly spinning in circles with his bass and Jeremy Barnes thrashing away behind the drums, and Mangum’s meditative, dark solo songs. There were maybe three or four thousand people in attendance. Everybody knew every word of every song.
These new shows have got fans wondering whether they will generate another album. But while I have immense respect for Jeff Mangum and Neutral Milk Hotel, and would obviously support whatever effort they put into another release, I’m not sure I need another record. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea isa matchless staple of indie folk rock canon. The fact that it’s still selling – better than it ever has, in fact – is evidence enough that it can still, almost seventeen years later, sustain fans. The storytelling and production are so layered and intricate that every time I listen, I get something new from it. It’s a lowkey masterpiece, and even if Neutral Milk Hotel play the same old songs at their shows from now until the end of time, that’s okay. Because they’ve already given so, so much to me. To indie rock. To music.
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