Neutral Milk Hotel
Released on February 10, 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea turns 25 today: here's how Anne Frank’s The Diary Of A Young Girl inspired one of the great cult albums of the '90s
As a child, Jeff Mangum experienced recurring lucid dreams – nightmares, really – of a bomb hurtling towards him. He’d always manage to wake himself up right before it hit, but in the morning light his hands felt huge and the bed seemed as hard as concrete. In others, he’d see spirits moving through walls or giant bugs crawling on the floor. One time, in a hotel in Amarillo, Texas, he realised he’d been sleepwalking and came to while standing on top of the sheets, staring at what looked like spotlights making popping sounds. This is an insight into the unquiet mind that plagues the chief architect of Neutral Milk Hotel.
In early 1995, days before he was due to fly to Denver to record debut album On Avery Island with boyhood friend and musical co-conspirator Robert Schneider, Mangum walked around his hometown of Ruston, Louisiana, with a curious preoccupation on his mind: would the world make more sense if he knew the entirety of its history, or would it merely make him insane?
Concluding it would most certainly be the latter, he retreated to a bookstore in an effort to distract himself from such impossible thoughts, picking up a copy of Anne Frank’s The Diary Of A Young Girl. So consumed was he by the implicit sadness of the teenage holocaust victim’s story that he spent the next three days crying. Suddenly, songs were demanding to be written about it. And 50 years on from the end of the second World War, the seeds of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea were sown in the most unlikely of sources.
Graphics by Martine Ehrhart
The fruits of their collective labour make for a listening experience unlike many others. To do so is to visit a particularly disorienting world, one in which Mangum pulls the curtain back on many of his hallucinations and night terrors. Freakshow imagery abounds, with tales of mutated children preserved in formaldehyde (Two-Headed Boy).
The surrealistic Communist Daughter imagines cars careening from clouds and semen covered mountain tops. Ghost and the cacophonous fuzz of Holland 1945 drop you into the plight of Anne Frank, but references prove oblique and scrambled.
On the music box-like intro to The King Of Carrot Flowers Pts 2 & 3 Mangum sings, “I love you, Jee-ee-sus Ch-rii-ii-iist” like a Kumbaya campfire crank best avoided, but then the song explodes into life with riotous indie-punk energy.
In The Aeroplane Over The Sea still sells upwards of 25,000 copies worldwide every year. Twenty-five on, it seems to be more popular than ever, with artists like Franz Ferdinand, Tame Impala and Arcade Fire lauding its influence and legacy.
Pitchfork went as far as removing their initial review and replacing it with a new review of a reissue, complete with a perfect - and rare - 10/10 rating. Magnet magazine went further still, acclaiming it as the best album of the ‘90s.
The truth of its place and importance probably lies somewhere in between all that big talk and hyperbole. When the lines between mythology, fact and fiction become as blurred as they are in this case, a little overexcitement can probably be forgiven.
In reality, it’s not a record for everyone, but for those with whom it resonates, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea remains one to be cherished dearly.
Original recording released February 10, 1988
