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I once tried to teach myself to play Neutral Milk Hotel's "Two-Headed Boy" on the guitar. The chords were easy enough -- G, B, C, D and an occasional A minor. The rhythm was sort of hard to grasp -- it's in 7/8 time, if I remember correctly -- but I got it down after a couple of days. It was the vocals, however, that I couldn't even come close to duplicating. It takes a lot to sing and scream poetry at the same time. You have to kind of open your gut and sing from a place inside yourself that you seldom want to visit, let alone allow family or friends to see. I then tried to sing the song in a melodic, Ben Gibbard-y style...but it just didn't work. Jeff Mangum, the main man behind the legendary, Elephant 6-rooted Neutral Milk Hotel, has a way of singing that is desperately beautiful. His voice ranges from loud and obnoxious to amazingly emotive and moving. I, in comparison, sounded like Jiminy Cricket.
Not unlike his voice, Mangum's subject matter will often mix beautiful and traumatically horrific imagery. "The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One", for example, opens In The Aeroplane Over The Sea with the image of two lovers beating each other. However, by addressing such actions as if they always had and always will occur, Mangum weaves in his own distinct tale of experiencing love for the first time. Such stark contrasts occur throughout the album. The next track shifts from the almost-famous line "I love you Jesus Christ" to a world in which darkly enclosed souls attempt to express themselves in any way possible. "I will spit until I lean how to speak," he slurs.
Once again, in "Holland, 1945", Mangum entangles himself in the life of Anne Frank, encapsulating her tragic story in quirky-yet-heartrending lyrics -- "The only girl I've ever loved / Was born with roses in her eyes / But then they buried her alive / One evening 1945" -- and drowning the words in acoustic-tinged fuzz. "Communist Daughter" follows a similar path, as Mangum paints a lovely picture of a pretty girl standing in a tumultuous ocean with waves crashing all around her...and semen-stained mountains. The short, sweet features perhaps his most original chord progression, and is paired with an intriguingly lo-fi texture.
We are thus prepared for the epic "Oh Comely", an eight-minute-plus tune that initially seems like nothing more than a highly detailed character sketch. Mangum speaks of Comely's fictional mother and his cheating father, and adds descriptions of Comely's angst-intensive search (we're not quite sure what for), which only results in "hollow" activities. In the process, Mangum immortalizes poetically obtuse descriptions like "Bristling and ugly / Bursting with fruits falling out from the holes / Of some pretty bright and bubbly friend." It is the narrator's presence in the song, however, that makes it so amazing. At first, he appears to be no more than a detached third party who enjoys describing Comely in an insulting manner. But the narrator and Comely slowly integrate -- a process established by the repeated lines, "Say what you want to say / And hang for your hollow ways / Moving your mouth to pull out all your miracle ways for me." Then, with the lyrics "Know all your enemies / We know who our enemies are", the song breaks into a musical epiphany-inducing horn sequence. The true nature of the song's revelation isn't made clear to us until its final words: "Place your body here / Let your skin begin to blend itself with mine." This suggests that the beautifully delicate Comely and the insultingly evil narrator are, indeed, one being.
The album is also distinguished by its final track, "Two Headed Boy Pt. 2", which puts In The Aeroplane Over The Sea's view of love (one of the album's many vague, conceptual themes) to rest. Character-wise, it picks up where "Two Headed Boy" left off -- and "Two Headed Boy", as even more of a character sketch than "Oh Comely", is the album's most personal song -- a stark narrative painted by an acoustic guitar and Mangum's vocals. Mangum's lyrics, though still poetic, are more desperate than ever, perhaps driven by the song's urgent rhythm. The Two Headed Boy wants some sort of functional love and affection -- and "Part 2" resolves this with a clever, quasi-happy ending: "Two headed boy she is all you could need / She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires / And retire to sheets safe and clean / But don't hate her when she gets up to leave." It's not unlike the end of Pink Floyd's The Wall; musical and narrative themes are resolved, but you know that it's not really an ending.
Mangum once covered a Phil Spector song, "I Love How You Love Me", and made it sound great by reducing its elements to an acoustic guitar and his voice. Unlike delicate pop music, which is content to slowly chisel a tunnel to your heart, NMH takes the most direct route, slicing you open with words. "Two Headed Boy" -- along with other mostly-acoustic tracks, like "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea", "Communist Daughter", and "Oh Comely" -- includes some of the rawest emotion ever put to tape. This is balanced by a pair of instrumentals; "The Fool" is a spiraling bit of marching music featuring Spanish horns that blow in 3/4 time, and the untitled tenth track is an upbeat little march that features bagpipes and organs. The sound feels complete -- sometimes comfortably over-produced, and sometimes appropriately lo-fi. In short, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is simply beautiful.
-- Josh Kazman
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