Music Arcades: Neutral Milk Hotel: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Listen, I had this album way before it became a cult classic, certainly on this side of the Atlantic. I was on time this time, and got it on import. And I owe it all to Mixing It. They played just one track from it on the radio. I can't even remember which track it was, but it was enough to send me off to Cheap or What? to order. It wasn't plane (pun not intended) sailing from there, however. According to my old emails, I first ordered it on 22 December 1998, but a month later COW were still saying it was "expected soon", and six months after that they told me it had been continually out of stock at their suppliers. I tried again in August '99 and got the same response a month later. It was another year before I actually got my hands on a copy (hmmm, it might have been a cult classic by then?) and I don't know exactly where it came from.

Of course, by the time the CD arrived, I must have long forgotten what that track on the radio had sounded like. I copied the album onto minidisc and wandered round Sheffield letting it seep into me. It took a while, but when it did, it was quite a revelation: climbing up Bagshot Street, wondering, "Did he really just sing 'semen stains the mountain top'?!" Repeat listens confirmed that he did indeed.

It's definitely an album, this; not a just a collection of songs. You can feel it building in intensity up to a climax at about the 25-30 minute mark (tracks 8, 9 and 10). It all feels like a stream-of-subconsciousness, like the tortured dreams of a hot night when you've got a fever. Ah, I've just poked around on Wikipedia to find the suggestion that it's all based on dreams of a Jewish family in Holland during the Second World War. Each track on the album also has its own Wikipedia page — that's cult classics for you — though, while these pages have a few more clues, they unsurprisingly don't have a fully coherent story to make them all fit together.

What holds them together in the ear is the bravura performance. The singing and playing, well, they're not what you'd call 'tutored'. But they are intense. Nowadays there's plenty of this kind of music about, and it gets called (very loosely) "freak folk". Although this isn't folk (too many horns for that), it's certainly freaky, and arguably a bit of a trailblazer in that respect — though of course there have been freaks going back to the invention of haircuts.

As for Jeff Mangum, the writer and central performer of the album, he got lost from my radar after this album (the second and last by the band), though evidently he's still working. It's actually the drummer and organist of Neutral Milk Hotel, Jeremy Barnes, who has a much higher profile in England, as half of A Hawk and a Hacksaw. We've seen them at the Green Man Festival and in London. Lucy has their The Way the Wind Blows album, and we enjoyed that on holiday in Cornwall recently.

"Aeroplane"? I thought it was spelled "Airplane" in America. But I've noticed some Americans writing "grey" instead of "grey" and occasionally referring to Autumn instead of Fall. Do they have some kind of 'high' version of US English that they drop into when trying to sound sophisticated and, well, European? (Sorry, I know that sounds a bit like flamebait, but it's not intended that way, I promise — just poking a little cheeky, but affectionate, fun.)