DommeDamian
Imperfect, sensitive Aspie with a melody addiction
Gender: Male
Age: 24
Location: where the flowers grow. 
- #3
- Posted: 03/17/2025 21:31
- Post subject:
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This is my favorite album ever. I hope you read this (a bit credit to AfterHours too).
What makes an album transformational and essential, is the unique amount of layers and qualities to discover per person. Hence the internet has hundreds of reviews of OK Computer and Citizen Kane, praising it for nearly completely different reasons. Or at least saying different things about it, while the common denominator is the rating.
That typea philosophy was in me when ITAOTS came into my life. I was about to get Cornrows for the first time. When me and my mom got there, the barber had time in like 30 minutes. We then saw a mini-record store a few meters from the barbershop. Full of vinyl for sale, under some stacks, I found the 2005 reissue in a little box, collectively with other stacks of CDs I don’t care for. I pretty much felt the same way about In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, as babyblueSedan (in the first two lines of his second paragraph). I didn’t want to buy it, ‘cause I wasn’t sure enough yet. But A month later, when they had to redo my cornrows, during the process, I asked my mom to go get it - I detailed exactly where it was, because I remembered... After 10 minutes, she came back with the CD and a smile on her face. She explained that the seller had complimented my taste, saying the record is a masterpiece, and loads of layers, and lovabilities. I opened it up [fun fact: it was difficult to take it outta the slipcase], and there was no text anywhere on the outside (later, I found out, the UPC is written as white on the side) - that was something new, inspiring kind of. I then asked my mom to read the long text, and she gave up after 4 lines. I popped it in the player when we got home.
I didn’t quite get it, besides Oh Comely (which is still one of my favorites, NR now my favorite song ever written). It even took me longer, to love the Lo-Fi cuts like Holland 1945 or that untitled joint. But the more I listened to it, the more I loved it.
The biggest discussion around the album that makes it divided is Jeff Mangum's all-round utterly wonderful and beautiful voice. It is not just that he is singing with all his heart and soul, but it is also that the singing itself is so engaged, so enraptured, so possessed by and lost in the moment, that it (seemingly spontaneously, or at least, "impulsively" / "suddenly"), at several points across the album, throws him straight INTO the emotion and even time frame (child, boyhood, adulthood, past or present) of the lyrical content he is singing about. Very very few albums feature vocal performances that are so completely consumed and integrated with their emotional content. For specifics, listen to the title track: he sounds both happy and sad simultaneously. His voice is in the register of an adult becoming a child again.
But it is also a happiness that is childlike and naive, so it expresses a silly exuberance and naivete in the face of a tragedy that is hard to confront. Obviously, as in the whole album, the instrumentation takes on these qualities and characteristics too, here becoming increasingly dark and conflicted as the song progresses. Take Two-Headed Boy, and witness how his vocal performance alternates, by the changing momentum of phrase, between the register of a nostalgic, heartbroken adult to that of a screaming or yelling younger boy in a sudden emotional outburst. But, crucially, as in so much of the album, it is both happy AND sad simultaneously, transfixed in and confused by both the joy and happiness and nostalgia of childhood and by heavy realities of adult trauma -- with the silly, unabashed exuberance of a naive child, before returning to the adult register as it ends and the prospect of death becomes complete. Even The Fool, the instrumental it segues into, is both a "happy" dance waltz, while also ambiguously, a funeral march for the dead. Oh Comely is of course the zenith of this oscillation, this alternating emotion/theme as it progresses in stages or movements through different time periods freely and his voice is enlivened and dies over and over within them, between childhood and adulthood, grief and stupefied happiness.
The whole work is struck by this incredible exuberance, vitality of feeling and being alive, while often simultaneously (or in other cases, just following, alternating, one with the other without warning ... suddenly, tragically, thrust upon...), an overwhelming tragedy and sadness and heartbreak. This sense of each toll of emotion being "thrust upon" him, unavoidable, outside of his emotional control, is incredibly powerful and permeates the whole work, lending the sheer audacity and "haphazardness" of the vocal performance a whole new sense of depth and purpose and meaning beyond its already considerable energy and power, not to mention the frequent "doubling"/ambiguity of the emotional meaning of its phrases giving it additional and tremendous psychological, emotional power and depth.
Aeroplane is very much like that friend you can tell everything to; you can; cry, laugh, cruise, write, hit, sit still, sleep, die, walk, run, eat, drink, vomit, take dumps, shower, get hype etc. to this record and it WON'T FALL/FEEL OUT OF PLACE. It's potentially the only album I could call both perfect and imperfect. Well, I have too many reasons why I love it. All in all, this is an album that’s built to last. Imma wrap up my little description by state a quote from the slipcase of the CD cover, that I fully agree with:
‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is one of the most completely inspiring rock records I’ve ever heard… every time I finish listening to it I feel like I’ve lived through something I’ll never quite understand, something really big — Richard Reed Parry, Arcade Fire'
btw how do most of my top spots contain lo-fi / indie-folk / singer-songwriter releases? Well, I have officially found my favorite genre 
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My Top 100 :
www.besteveralbums.com/thechart.php?c=4...amp;page=1
My music:
- www.hyperfollow.com/dommedamian
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