In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a personal album but not in the way you expect. It's not biography. It's a record of images, associations, and threads; no single word describes it so well as the beautiful and overused "kaleidoscope." It has the cracked logic of a dream, beginning with "King of Carrot Flowers Part 1". Something tells me that you guys are tired of having me say that about every single album on this list, but it's true. Their first full length album, On Avery Island was underwhelming even without the benefit of hindsight, and frankly this album set the bar impossibly high for anything they were planning to release afterward, so it's not surprising the band informally disbanded and their front man Jeff Mangum put the guitar down.
This album takes you on a journey completely different from the other albums. There is a cloud of sadness hovering over the entire album but the contrast that provides with the music makes for an epic adventure.
Inside this adventure it all begins in the body. Moments of trauma, joy, shame-- here they're all experienced first as physical sensation. A flash of awkward intimacy is recalled as "now how I remember you/ how I would push my fingers through your mouth/ to make those muscles move." Mangum here reflects the age when biological drives outpace the knowledge of what to do with them, a time you're seeing sex in everything ("semen stains the mountaintops") or that sex can be awkward and unintentionally painful ("fingers in the notches of your spine" is not what one usually hopes for in the dark). Obsessed as it is with the textures of the flesh and the physical self as an emotional antenna, listening to Aeroplane sometimes seems to involve more than just your ears.
Have we established yet that this record really is pretty fucking weird? Because that honestly can't be stressed enough. The musical styles here are many, with constant changes in the music being something truly remarkable.
What makes it even more powerful is the contrast that it creates the rest of the music, with its complex arrangements and sense of fun. Sure, the whole album has a deep sadness running through it, but on Two-Headed Boy, when you can hear Mangum's voice straining to reach the emotional peaks of his entire career, it becomes more than just a meaningful song at the heart of the album. And then, just as everything dies down towards the end, a brass section comes in, leading us into the funereal march of The Fool. Just like that, the track changes, and we're off on another part of the journey.
The best way to sum up this album, and conclude this review is to take a look at one of Bob Dylan's greatest lines: "If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine." Aeroplane is what happens when you have that knowledge and still take the risk.
Best Songs
THE WHOLE THING.
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