Description
Of all the recordings to emerge from the Athens-via-Denver collective
called Elephant 6, Neutral Milk Hotel’s second album is the one that has
worked its way under the most skins. Magnet magazine named it the best
album of the 1990s, and Creative Loafing recently devoted a cover story
to one fan’s quest to understand why band leader Jeff Mangum dropped out
of sight soon after Aeroplane’s release. The record sells steadily to
an audience that finds it through word of mouth.
Weird, beautiful, absorbing, difficult, In The Aeroplane Over the Sea
is a surrealist text loosely based on the life, suffering and
reincarnation of Anne Frank, with guest appearances from a pair of
Siamese twins menaced by the cold and carnivores, a two-headed boy
bobbing in a jar, anthropomorphic vegetables and a variety of immature
erotic horrors.
Mangum sings his dreamlike narratives with a dreamer's intensity, his
creaky, off key voice occasionally breaking as he struggles to complete
each dense couplet. The music is like nothing else in the 90s indie
underground: a psychedelic brass band, its members self-taught, forging
polychromatic washes of mood and tribute. The songs stick to one narrow
key, the images repeat and circle back, and to listen is to be absorbed
into a singular, heart-rending vision.
Author(s)
Kim Cooper,
Kim Cooper is the editrix of Scram, an occasional journal of unpopular culture dedicated to celebrating unjustly neglected artists in the worlds of music, literature, film/TV, comics and bohemia. With fellow 33 1/3 scribe David Smay, she is co-editor of the anthologies Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth and Lost in the Grooves: Scram's Capricious Guide to the Music You Missed. A third generation Angeleno, Kim offers offbeat bus tours of the city's crimes, literature and architectural gems through Esotouric, and blogs at the crime-a-day 1947project.
Reviews
‘Cooper has managed to write the best music book that I've read so far… Awe alongside simple, direct speech. It's a delicate balance, that Cooper's excellent writing manages to preserve throughout the whole book…And this book doesn't only give information and wrap this exemplary album with an excellent text, it also gives me, and the rest of the prisoners of Jeff Mangum's scorched and wounded world, the excuse and the opportunity to climb on the rooftops and shout: ‘For crying out loud, people, you better get to know this album now, before the aeroplane over the sea crashes exactly on that island with the place for only one record.’’ ~ Guy Hajaj, Haoneg.com, 2006
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