Album of the day (#2879): In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

[albummaster]

Today's album of the day

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel (View album | Buy this album)

Year: 1998.
Country:
Overall rank: 17
Average rating: 88/100 (from 2244 votes).

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

Tracks:
1. The King Of Carrot Flowers Pt. One
2. The King Of Carrot Flowers Pt. Two & Three
3. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
4. Two-Headed Boy
5. The Fool
6. Holland, 1945
7. Communist Daughter
8. Oh Comely
9. Ghost
10. (Untitled)
11. Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two

About album of the day: The BestEverAlbums.com album of the day is the album appearing most prominently in member charts in the previous 24 hours. If an album, or artist, has previously been selected within a x day period, the next highest album is picked instead (and so on) to ensure a bit of variety. A full history of album of the day can be viewed here.

[theblueboy]

Well, this album has been much discussed on this site already. But am I the only one who thinks it sounds like the Pogues as much as anything else?

[HoldenM]

[HazeyTwilight]

one time I sang along with this album at the top of my lungs (I bet my neighbours all loved that sound). I recited every lyric from memory that's how much this album had impacted me.

my throat was sore afterwards but it was so worth it

also why does pitchfork see this album as a kitschy Terry Gilliam animation that reimagined by Tim Burton
_________________

[AfterHours]

Just revisited this masterpiece... I mentioned the following points when asked about it some months ago. Not very in-depth but captures the bullet points...

The entire album is a never ending circle/spiral through time, from its merry-go-round and unified emotional arc, down to the cyclic structures of individual songs, even down to the circular chordal & rhythmic sequences. As a whole, it becomes akin to a single, elongated stream-of-consciousness that is constantly expanding or delving deeper into itself, a series of visions consistently on the verge of spinning out of control.

It is possibly the most haphazardly heart-on-sleeve album of all time, erupting in a whole new level of emotional honesty, conviction and abandon for songs realized primarily in strict pop formats. The singer, Jeff Mangum, is completely uninhibited and lost in the moment, and his backing band is extraordinarily evocative and nearly his equal in spontaneity. The album is performed as if it all just suddenly happened in a burst of miraculous inspiration. Lightning in a bottle that can never be repeated (not even by Mangum himself). Incredibly it doesn't come across as pretentious (which should be impossible considering its content and how it is expressed) because none of it sounds even remotely premeditated, but overwhelmingly inspired in the exact moment of elicitation. This is practically revolutionary for "pop music" which is generally highly contrived and the opposite of such an inspiration and epiphany of expression. It amounts to an anti-thesis or dichotomy upon the genre itself, an expressive force of nature its format is designed to inhibit, a paradigm shift for pop music and an emotional liberation and blueprint for artists ever since.

The album reinvigorates the young Bob Dylan in its folk, evangelical tones and streams-of-consciousness (Mr. Tambourine Man, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue...). It reinvigorates the wragged glory and moral odysseys of Neil Young. It reinvigorates the surreal Pop Art of Pearls Before Swine and The Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever and Across the Universe. It reinvigorates the wild, circus atmospheres of Frank Zappa's masterpieces. It reinvigorates the awestruck, desperate, characterful vocal elocution and sonority of The Mountain Goats and Stan Ridgway's most expressive works.

It synthesizes all of these, surpassing them into its own inimitable delirium, an incredible outpouring of courageous emotional honesty.

Emotionally the album constantly strikes a dilated paradox between overwhelming depression, sympathy, loss and nostalgia with an awestruck, child-like wonder or ecstacy. Virtually every phrase of voice and instrument holds this juxtaposition to bear in wide-eyed visions and lullabies. Due to this, the result is simultaneously devastating and life-affirming.

Ultimately its emotional expressions are a tremendous suffering of abandonment, in great sympathy and tenderness, as if from a longing, yearning and needy newborn or child to his dying mother. Its lullabies are the sound (literally, physically) of Mangum being cradled and rocking interminably and inconsolably in the devastation and disbelief at such irreversible loss. Ultimately, it is Mangum, traversing the diary of his afflictions in the fluctuations of his phrasing and expressions as he is continually being fraught with the alternating influx of his painful, wide-eyed evocations expressed first and foremost in the details of his vocal changes, breaks and spontaneous gestures, laments or outcries. Through an astonishing and paralyzing emotional transference, he is physically and expressively becoming the devastated savior of the Anne Frank of her diaries merged unto his own, eliciting a synthesis of his personality through hers in a collision of shock and despair, carrying her dying body against his in monumental scenes of burden and compassion.
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[Tha1ChiefRocka]

My 5 word dissenting opinion on this album.

They try way too hard.

[Hayden]

[DommeDamian]

One of my favorites albums of all time. I don't give a fuck, how cliché it sounds, it's nonetheless TRUE.

Writing this wearing a longsleeve shirt, with the phenomenal coverart.

ITAOTS has, over the span of a year, saved and changed my life, that only emotions can explain. When I listen to it in March, it'll probably be placed higher.

[theblueboy]

[PaperVinnie]

I don't think it deserves to be #17, but top 100 is justified.