In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

It's hard to pigeon-hole where the sound comes from - the other reviewers may do a better job than I will about describing precisely what it's like. The best way I can describe it, I think, is to say that it's discordantly beautiful. There's a near-riot of instruments battling each other for your attention, filling your ears with conflicting sounds but somehow coming out the other end in perfect harmony as they do so. It's also worth noting that it's far from your typically over-produced fare - nobody has spent three days tweaking the drum rhythms to get them precisely right so that they appeal to the widest cross-section of the target audience. Nobody has fiddled with sliders to get his voice spot onto each note. This is raw music, mainlining the melodies, the rhythms, and most of all the emotion straight from source. Joyous, sorrowful, imaginative, perceptive, evocative... it reaches inside you and yanks your soul awake and reminds you that you're alive. Like watching a flower grow in that fast-motion style that can make months pass in seconds - organic, natural, beautiful, and most of all full of the throb and pulse of Life with a capital L.

I just know that I think this is the best album I own, and probably will ever own, and that everybody I know who is fortunate enough to have found In The Aeroplane Over The Sea feels the same way. I don't know what Jeff Mangun did before this, and I don't know what he did after this. Very probably he never hit these heights, but right here on this little silver disc he produces a work of unique unrepeatable genius.

I only heard the record for the first time in early 2005, but it's already one of my top three albums of all time, with Jeff Mangum's acoustic based tales of woe eventually working their way into my subconscious and grabbing hold of my imagination following numerous late-night listening sessions. It's an album that demands attention from the listener... not one to be raped and pillaged for the benefit of your iPod, or played in the background during dinner parties for your friends. You have to work at these songs, picking through the seemingly random stream-of-conscious lyrics, whilst somehow finding yourself entranced by the simple and repetitive strumming and occasional bursts of horns, pianos and other wild instrumental touches like organs, tape effects and singing saws.

The first song, King of Carrot Flowers Pt 1 is the easiest song to like on the first listen, with Mangum tapping into a hazy sense of monochromatic nostalgia, as he intones the opening line "when you were young you were the king of carrot flowers, and how you built a tower tumbling through the trees". The rest of the song continues that sense of looking back, with Mangum peppering his lyrics with childlike evocations, as a sweet harmonium counter-melody comes in to jar against the switch into darker lyrical territory, and we start to see the emergence of something much more sinister. At first, these lyrics seem absolutely random and completely indecipherable, but really, the more we listen to the album, the more we take from it. Everyone who listens to it will have their own personal interpretations of what Mangum's lyrics might be pointing to... I personally see it as an ode to unrequited love, and that dangerous kind of obsession that Mangum looked at in his post-Aeroplane song "Little Birds".

The album is perfectly put together, progressing seamlessly from the strummed folk of King of Carrot Flowers Pt 1, into the minimal King of Carrot Flowers Pts 2, which opens with some subtle guitar picking and a minimal burst of organ, with Mangum's trembling shout intoning the refrain "I love you Jesus Christ!!". Like much of the album, this earnest statement seems to be inviting ridicule, but, like the idea of yearning for Anne Frank, Mangum means it, and I feel privileged to be able to share in his sense of devotion. From here, we move into Carrot Flowers Pt 3 (subtitled Up and Over), which is something close to folk-psychedelia, as a bombardment of horns and some quickly strummed guitars enter the fray and the song moves off in a direction that brings to mind the band's first album, the urgent and distorted On Avery Island.

The entire album is a joy to listen to... one that I've been playing constantly since I first got it one that I'd hope to be playing for many more decades to come. The ideology of the band and the album itself begins to become clearer with songs like In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, and, in particular, Two Headed Boy, in which the album really just becomes a showcase for Mangum and his heavily-strummed acoustic guitar. As Andy Broder states on the re-issue sleeve, the album works because of the central juxtaposition, "lyrically, complex and gruesome... musically, simple and sweetly melodic". The title track builds around four basic verse chords (with some distant background instrumentation adding atmosphere) whilst Mangum and his evocative lyrics capture our imagination. The same can be said about Two Headed Boy, in which Mangum seems to be envisioning himself as a lost and lonely side-show performer, forced to watch the world go by from the confines of a glass-jar. It's a beautiful song; like the entirety of the album it's a stark combination of words and music that builds to something truly transcendent.

This album is really too great to put into words... from the Scott Spillane composed orgy of horns and Salvation Army style rhythms that is The Fool, through to the heartbreaking ode to Anne Frank, Holland 1945 ("the only girl I ever loved / was born with roses in her eyes / until they buried her alive / one evening 1945 / with just her sister at her side / and only weeks before the guns / all came and rained on everyone") and beyond that to the epic free-form ramble of Oh Comely... an eight-minute long character sketch that is probably the closest alternative-folk music ever has come to creating it's own Bohemian Rhapsody/Paranoid Android style moment of transcendence. I've not even mentioned the ghostly lament of the Communist Daughter, or the surreal, psychedelic instrumental with no name, or the defining moment for me, the gorgeous and heartbreaking Two Headed Boy Pt 2.

Here, Mangum makes himself clear... "in my dreams you're alive and you're crying / as your mouth moves in mine soft and sweet / rings of flowers round your eyes and I'll love you / for the rest of your life / in your reading". I'm not guaranteeing that you'll have as intense an experience listening to the album that I have... this record just means something to me... something greater than words could ever express.