Heil, Mrs. Tambourine Head...?
And this is the granddaddy of them all.
To be honest, I hadn't thought much about this album in the last couple of years until a late-night acoustic guitar sing-along with some friends a couple of months ago prompted me to go listen to it again. Suddenly, as I was singing the songs from that record for the first time in forever, apparently doing a pretty good Jeff Mayyy-eeeengum impersonation, and feeling more collegiate than I ever have in my life (take that however you'd like), I was taken back a few years and was instantly reminded of what those songs meant to me.
I was an impressionable fifteen year old with a broken heart and a wealth of hilariously unimportant problems, and amidst the very worst of it all, this album was there. I don't know why it was this one over any number of other albums that I was into at the time that tend to comfort people in their dire teenage years (Weezer's Pinkerton, The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin, The Arcade Fire's Funeral). Maybe Aeroplane just happened to be the one that I was playing at the time. Whatever the reason, it worked, and how couldn't it? Mangum sang lyrics that were emotional, but with enough abstraction that they never became overbearing or pathetic, at very loud volumes while straining to hit notes that he was just never meant to hit. It was also a pretty easy and fun album to learn to play on the guitar, so I felt like I was making the songs on this record my own on another level.
And how liberating it was to sing lines like "And we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for," "God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life," "And she goes and now she knows she'll never be afraid," "But for now we are young/Let us lay in the sun/And count every beautiful thing we could see," "Rings of flowers around your eyes/And I'll love you for the rest of your life." Hyper-romantic mini-manifestos are one thing, although they become even more powerful when cloaked around bizarre phrases like "Semen stains the mountaintops," "She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires," "And you watched as your brains fell out through your teeth," etc. And to top it all off, you get these other abstractions that mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, ("I love you Jesus Christ," and all the Anne Frank references in particular) but when plopped into the album they only add another layer of mystique to the ordeal. It probably all means something in Mangum's head, and I'm sure it's possible to decipher, although I can't do it, not just because I don't have the profundity to do so but simply because I don't want to. The lyrics are perfect enough as they are, little whirlwinds of the English language, obtuse observations of natural weirdness wherein can be found carefully constructed declarations of undying love and all that other hoo-hah. Or something like that. Contrived? Perhaps. But the immense amount of meaning that I've given to these words and that these words have given to me feels so genuine that any contrivance just seems irrelevant.
Naturally, another factor that develops meaning of words is delivery, and Mangum's distinctive vocal performance on the album has been one of the greatest areas of dispute when it comes to dissecting Aeroplane's merits. We all know how he does it, he'll start off quiet, begin dragging and changing one-syllable words, get really loud and then strain to hit those really high notes (and shockingly, succeeds with all of them, really). Regrettably, Mangun has basically set the precedent for any hyper-emotional acoustic troubadour, either wailing grade school level lyrics at one and a half tones from the correct pitch (I know I just went on about how it's nice to hear people sing out of tune, but if it's a third-rate carbon copy of the original singing worse lyrics, well, everybody's got their limits), or singing slightly-above-grade school level poetry, but really sensitively (read: lacking testicles). Unfortunate as this is though, what Mangum has that few or none of his spawn possess is a true organic feel to his voice. The whole thing sounds spontaneous and authentic, and I don't doubt that most of it was. If you turn up your speakers at the end of "Oh Comely," you can hear someone yell out "Holy shit!" in the background, apparently impressed that Mangum was able to complete the whole thing in one take.
And this is something that permeates the whole album, this organic quality. Rob Schneider did a damn fine job producing this record, because the thing really does sound like it's coming from a bunch of guys holed up in some shack in the Pacific Northwest, surrounded by a bunch of instruments bought at yard sales that they've sort of learned how to play in the last year. I envision Mangum brooding in the corner while the rest of the band tries to figure out which extra instruments they can use to decorate the songs. With regard to the arrangements, I am a real sucker for slapping on all sorts of weird instruments onto any song, but the same organic quality that cuts through Mangum's voice, again helps the added instrumentation feel genuine and not so gimmicky.
Case in point, "Ghost," which held the title of my favorite song of all time for quite a while is perfect in almost every way. The build-up is sublime - acoustic guitar meets ultra-loud, distorted fuzz bass, soon to be backed by Jeremy Barnes' rickety drum fills and Scott Spillane's horns. Then the tempo picks up, Mangum starts wailing and the song drives and pushes along until finally, the whole thing bursts out at the climax, leaving Julian Koster to take the vocal line by means of an angelic singing saw. It's the apex, really, and it probably wouldn't have worked if one piece of that puzzle was missing. I'm going to stop before the drool short circuits my keyboard.
The album is sequenced pretty flawlessly as well, blending the solo works with the group efforts seamlessly, moving from something sparse like "Two Headed Boy" to the ornate funeral march of "The Fool" right into the fuzz-blast rocker "Holland, 1945" (I truly feel sorry for you if the "2-1-2-3-4" EXPLOSION that kicks off "Holland 1945" does nothing for you.) The anthemic instrumental "Untitled" could have very easily kicked the album off nicely, but instead leaves that for the statelier "King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1" and tosses "Untitled" as the second to last song on the album. The gorgeous "Two Headed Boy, Pt. 2" ends everything, leaving the sound of Mangum putting his guitar down and leaving (right after the final line of the album, "But don't hate her when she gets up to leave") as the album's final impression.
Despite it only being around for eleven years, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has had varying levels of critical success. It was released to mixed reviews, but eventually gained extremely high accolades from all around the indie community, quickly elevating Jeff Mangum from "singer of Neutral Milk Hotel" to "indie God." Right as this was happening, and also certainly due to the immense pressure to follow up Aeroplane (a difficult task for anyone), Mangum disappeared, a move that solved his problem temporarily, but also made him an unfortunate target for the indie paparazzi. Whenever the poor bastard shows up anywhere, it's news, and I don't doubt at all that he despises it. Perhaps his recent appearances, though are in response to a bit of backlash that Aeroplane seems to be receiving now that the hype has died down, with criticisms placed on Mangum's vocal delivery, the everything-but-maybe-the-kitchen-sink instrumentation, and most unfortunately, the album's reputation as a cornerstone of the hipster set.
And maybe if I heard the album for the first time now, I'd be a bit jaded, but as the way things go, it will almost certainly stay with me as a remarkable masterwork of modern music. I wasn't even sure if that would be the case that one night when I was playing these songs on guitar with friends. I wanted to listen to it when I got back to my dorm, but instead I kept putting it off and eventually kinda forgot about it again. And then just the other night, I was feeling kind of lousy and went for a drive and put it on. My doubts were alleviated. It still does it to me. Every goddamn time.
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