December 3, 1998
Like a wildly surreal, ramshackle marching band spreading dirty sex and gorgeous chaos through the twisted geometry of a Dali painting, Neutral Milk Hotel is the most fascinating band I've heard in many a grinning moon. Deliberately lo-fi and shot through with raw brilliance, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is a magnificent effort from Jeff Magnum's parade of madmen.
Populated by two-headed boys, the king of carrot flowers, communist daughters, synthetic flying machines, pianos filled with flames and skies raining milk and holy water, the album screams with ambition and more than a little raving lunacy. Is it about religion? Lust? Beauty? Ghosts from 1929? Trailer parks, comets and the nature of God? Yes.
The sound is as immediate and accessible as the lyrics are obtuse - melodies that could buttress a skyscraper are delivered by jarring fuzz bass, flugelhorn, white noise organ, euphonium, zanzithophone (?) and singing saw. Gentle songs accompanied only by folky guitar burst into frenzied, buzzing anthems. The band plays with a go-for-broke recklessness while Magnum sings with an adenoidal glossolalia, a torrent of images and words that reach beyond what words can express.
Magnum is the first artist in a long time to recapture the unselfconscious, unabashed joy of rock and roll. Even though their music evokes an amplified, radically distorted pre-WWII underground Americana, this feels like something altogether new. Gotdam if these kids ain't onto something.
- Jared O'Connor
lo-fi brilliance