Reviews for Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

by Kim Cooper

 

Alt.Culture.Guide, July 2006

In The Aeroplane Over The SeaWriter Kim Cooper, editor and publisher of the charming and informative pop culture zine Scram, has made a career out of championing the underrated and ill-fated musicians of days past. Both with her zine, and in wonderful books like Lost In The Grooves or Bubblegum Music Is The Naked Truth, Cooper evinces a great deal of affection for, and insight into, the music and musicians she writes about. Thus it should come as no surprise that Cooper has hooked up with Continuum to write one of the better books in the company's esteemed 33 1/3 series about one of the more obscure, yet deserving albums in rock & roll.

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea offers more than just Cooper's take on the landmark 1998 album by cult faves Neutral Milk Hotel. Cooper delves into the band's roots, setting up the relationships between all of the musicians that made up the Elephant 6 collective and bands like Apples In Stereo and the Olivia Tremor Control. She outlines the collaborative efforts of the players, the travels necessary to bring them all to certain points (and places) in time, and the work behind the loose-knit collective's various projects. Finally, she focuses in on Jeff Mangrum, the multi-talented musician and songwriter who is the spark behind Neutral Milk Hotel and the man mostly responsible for the short-lived band's two excellent albums.

With her easy-going narrative, Cooper achieves one of the hardest things to do when introducing readers to perfect strangers: she infuses each of the main players with a personality. When finishing In The Aeroplane Over The Sea -- a quick read at a too-short 104 pages, a hallmark of the 33 1/3 series -- the reader not only has a sense of who Jeff Mangrum and friends are, but also what they were trying to accomplish with their music. Although both the album In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and its 1996 predecessor On Avery Island are dense, textured and maddeningly obtuse works, Cooper manages to shine a new light on both albums.

Although I must admit to no more than a passing familiarity with either Neutral Milk Hotel album, Cooper's book made me go out and buy both CDs, dammit! A perfect companion piece to the album that it dissects, Cooper's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea explains why the album's audience and importance grows with each passing year while doing a fine job of also relating the music's immense charm and...dare I say it...magic. Both the book and the album are highly recommended for anybody searching for meaningful music beyond this week's trends. (Rev. Keith A. Gordon)
 

Never News, July 24, 2006

While Colin Meloy's Let it Be was a intimate work (sort of an exploration of the album by way of personal memoir), Kim Cooper's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a more clinical, journalistic book. Which makes sense, because Cooper is a journalist type (she edits Scram) .

But the book isn't lacking certain personal moments—the whole thing is filled with intimate moments, based on both the very nature of the album and Neutral Milk Hotel's family (Elephant 6, if you're a layman).

The book explores the formation of the family, in part, from Ruston, Louisiana to the final homes of Denver, Colorado and Athens, Georgia. We're given a brief overview of Jeff Mangum's work pre-formation of the band we'd learn to know and love as Neutral Milk Hotel, from his sound-experiment tapes (under the same moniker) to his stints in other bands. She then gives us a point by point map of how Jeff gathered his players who would, ultimately, perform as both recording musicians and the touring band for both On Avery Island and Aeroplane.

The book is insightful, but never forcibly so; Cooper may lead us by the hand, but only so we can come to understand how the band, album, and music work, never so that she can show us why it does so.

We're given plenty of first-hand accounts on the rise and not fall, but end of NMH—right up to one of the big 'mysteries' of music; where Mangum went. The answer to that puzzle is surprisingly unsurprising; he simply stopped. Cooper gives us a comparison to Cobain's slow self-destruction, and how Jeff managed to avoid it.

Each song of the album is explored not as a critical consideration (which Cooper, sadly, does give us near the end) but as it was happening—how the songs were recorded (Oh, Comely, which has found its way into my head every day for the last three years, was recorded in one take, it would seem—when Mangum was doing a sound check, he played it perfectly straight through—the over dubs being added later—this story suddenly makes sense of the 'Holy Shit!' we hear at the end of the track).

On top of the deep examination of how things came to be, we get such an interesting history (which, I'll admit, I was craving) behind what (I'll dare say it) became the best album of the last sixteen years.

Each one of the entries of the 33 1/3 series that I read just excites me to read more; my first two (Let it Be and this one) were chosen because of the interest I had to either the writer (in Meloy's case) or the album (here). Given that they have such a mammoth release list now, I'm sure I'll find another such case (Harvest, for instance). But, even if that's not the case, the series warrants a full read; I yearn to just pick up each book (and corresponding album) in order and digest until my brain is muddied by all the full facts.

 

Portland Mercury, May 25, 2006 

It all happened in a hot magmatic flash; Neutral Milk Hotel dropped Aeroplane on February 10, 1998, met the drooling rock media head on, and then vanished by the end of the year. Nowadays all that's left is two full-lengths, an EP, and news of singer Jeff Mangum hermiting off in a monastery (or doing field recordings of Bulgarian folk festivals.) Kim Cooper sums up the story in three quick pages, then starts back at the beginning, winding up to the birth of Aeroplane—a messy, alive-sounding, psychedelic "fuzz folk" record with clattering production, a brass section, and a beautiful, sad, surrealist narrative based around the life, death, and reincarnation of Anne Frank. Cooper sits back and lets the band members, fans, and other sideliners tell the story, and the result is more oral history than rock criticism. A damn fine read. ADAM GNADE

Harp, May 2006

The premise of Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series is this: Esteemed music writers devote a good 100 or so chapbook-sized pages to albums of cultural and/or personal impact, exploring how they came to be and what they might mean.

In the case of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea—a cult album of mythic proportions—Scram editor Kim Cooper isn’t going to do all the hard work and tell you what it all means (drat!). In fact, only eight pages are devoted to dissecting the songs one by one. Cooper’s less interested in demystifying this very mystifying record, with its Anne Frank obsessions and ecstatic declaration of “I love you Jesus Christ!” than in presenting an oral history of its making, beginning with band members’ early days in Ruston, La., and the geographically diverse sprouting of what would become the Elephant 6 Collective.

The conversational tone of the book makes for a breezy, casual story, except we never hear from the person who fans want to hear from most: frontman Jeff Mangum. His is a grand absence, to be sure, but at least it preserves his status as an elusive figurehead. The closest you’ll get to understanding why he broke up NMH at the height of its popularity comes from girlfriend and band member Laura Carter. But just as Cooper wants you to listen to this album to find your own meaning in it, you’ll have to read this book to find out, what little you can, about the mystical proprietor of Neutral Milk Hotel. (Mia Quagliarello)

PopMatters, 4/7/06

Given Neutral Milk Hotel's shifting lineup and frequent moves in the years before and during Aeroplane, Cooper commendably maps out their story within a spare hundred some pages.

by Anne K. Yoder

The fans of Neutral Milk Hotel are insatiably hungry. For more music, for unreleased demo tapes, for a reunion tour. And for the band's history. Their album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, which has in recent years dominated the critics' lists of best albums from the end of the century, was released from seemingly out of nowhere, for most fans, in 1997. By the end of 1998, the band had broken up, long before the album had a chance to disseminate by word of mouth, and before its aural delights filled the ears of so many fans to whom this album means so much. The album barely had time to register before the band dispersed, and yet Aeroplane has only gained esteem in its brief life. Kim Cooper's new book on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the first to chronicle the album and the band's past, traces the band's development from central figure Jeff Mangum's childhood to its ultimate disintegration. It fills in the gaps, offering conversations with band members while tying together the sprawling story, and should take the edge off the appetites, at least for a while.

When Jeff Mangum left Neutral Milk Hotel and the public realm of music in 1998, his retreat spawned a fascination that's only grown since. Mangum was the creative force behind the band as the main songwriter, with fragments of songs circling his mind for years before he recorded them. Until now, the only way to piece together the band's story has been to sift through the fan sites, the message boards, and the smattering of interviews, profiles, and articles available online. Most were written while the band was still together, with a trickling stream of gems appearing afterward. Mangum's appearances post-Neutral Milk Hotel have been brief and scattered: a tenure of nine shows as a DJ on the New York freeform radio station WFMU, a lengthy interview on Pitchfork in 2002, and a disc of Bulgarian folk music recorded with Josh McKay and released by Orange Twin. Since then the well has been fairly dry.

To give you an idea of the excitement generated by Mangum, even in the briefest of appearances: At the Olivia Tremor Control show last summer at the Bowery Ballroom, when the crowd recognized the voice of Mangum, whose face was shadowed by a baseball cap as he descended to the stage from the wings, a heated cheer filled the club. And only hours after he joined the band for two songs, his appearance made online news headlines at Pitchfork, Spin, and Billboard. It's as if Mangum's spiritual presence in his music has heightened the awareness of his physical absence.

Perhaps that explains why Cooper's volume on the band and its music has sold faster than any of the other books in Continuum's 33 1/3 series. Released at the end of November, it has already entered its second printing, and has outsold books on both David Bowie's Low and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. But unlike Low and Born in the U.S.A., albums that do not lack for documentation, and whose creators are still very much making music and performing in public, Aeroplane is virgin territory. Kim Cooper's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea pulls the band's itinerant history together, and in doing so delves deeply into Jeff Mangum's musical development. It recounts Mangum's childhood friendships with fellow Elephant 6 members in Ruston, Louisiana, including their high school days running the local college radio station, and follows Mangum and the band's frequent moves between Athens, Georgia, New York, and Denver.

Through careful documentation and many conversations with Mangum's band mates, Mangum's former girlfriend Laura Carter, and many other musicians in the Elephant 6 community, Cooper relays a tale of how their close-knit friendships provided the fertile soil of experimentation, stimulation, and trust from which Neutral Milk Hotel blossomed. Band member Julian Koster emphasizes that the community of friends provided a haven that made such an album possible: "I think what Elephant 6 meant for us is very simple: there's something pure and infinite in you and wants to come out of you, and can come out of no other person on the planet. That's what you've got to share, and that's as neat and as important as the fact that you're alive."

Although Mangum's voice is noticeably absent from the book, he is its guiding force. The band's name comes from one of the various home recording projects Mangum started in high school, and the band's first album, On Avery Island, is very much his. In fact, Robert Schneider is the only other musician from this album who also appears on Aeroplane (as both the producer and as a musician). The book emphasizes Schneider's role in Aeroplane's sound, as an influence that's often overlooked. According to Koster, Schneider's vision helped define the album: "the sound of the album was a marriage between Robert's recording aesthetic and the band's sound, because the four of us had grown one--a confoundingly distinct and powerful one that we all recognized."

Given Neutral Milk Hotel's shifting lineup and frequent moves in the years before and during Aeroplane, Cooper commendably maps out their story within a spare hundred some pages. When it comes to analysis, though, Cooper is admittedly standoffish, as she feared "sucking all the mystery out of the lyrics and spoiling their effects." The requisite run through of the track list is pithy, and Cooper is so aware of not imposing her interpretation on readers that she includes a disclaimer before she proceeds.

For the musician and the admirer alike, anecdotes and details of the band's adventures and recording habits are bountiful. Much of the flavor comes from the stories that only those involved with the project could tell, such as when Mangum moved into Koster's already crowded New York apartment: "there were tape loops strung all over the apartment, enormous tape loops strung all over the room. You'd come in and there'd be pencils and cups and the tape would be stringing along." Or then there's the retelling of the "Scott Spillane Pizza Hut Incident": horn-player Spillane once forgetfully left a backpack filled with the band's tour profits --totaling ten to twenty thousand dollars -- at a Pizza Hut they'd stopped at while on the road. The bag was recovered with the money inside, but it incited panic in the few hours it took to return to the restaurant. Like a family, they recall this mishap that ended well with amusement, and all grudges, if there were any, are seemingly forgotten.

This little book deftly pulls together the band's past, finally coloring in a much-deserved telling of Aeroplane's background story. A history of Jeff Mangum's musical development as much as it is a companion piece to the album, the book also sheds light on his desire to shun the spotlight. Mangum, according to Laura Carter, "wanted to drop out and be like Robert Wyatt--be a recluse and then come out with an album every ten years and shock everybody." For musicians who enveloped themselves in a cocoon of likeminded friends, who lived and played together and buffered each other from the "real world" pressures of making money and finding practical jobs, it's not surprising that Mangum would want to retain the elements that fostered his music in the first place.

LA Weekly, 3/22/06

BLAH BLAH BLAH
Local author Kim Cooper has written a book on the making of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, often considered the “masterpiece” of the Elephant 6 collective (see also Apples in Stereo, Olivia Tremor Control). Like the ’98 album, her book — part of the 33 1/3 series of pocket-size LP histories — is a sleeper, outselling the series’ Springsteen and Bowie books!

You edited the anthology Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth. What’s the E6-bubblegum connection?

COOPER: Bubblegum is a geeky, joyful, unselfconscious scene, and so is Elephant 6. None of the Neutral Milk Hotel players were at all cool, and they were flabbergasted when cool kids started turning up at their shows. (Which happened for the first time in L.A., actually.)

Get much fan mail? I’ve received lots of very sweet messages from people who were moved by the book. My favorites are the ones that say, “I was dreading this book, but I ended up loving it.”

Where does Aeroplane fit in the catalogue of Jesus-inspired freak-folk? In the annex where faith is more implied than slathered, and all people are welcome who have ears to hear.

Will you tour? Here’s a scoop: [I will be making] an Elephant 6 documentary, and plan to travel to many important places in the E6 mythos. I’ll set up readings in as many of those towns’ book or donut shops [as possible].

Final thoughts? This book surprised me by being not so much about a rock band but about friendship and love and faith and art. Cooper reads at Vroman’s in Pasadena, Saturday, 4 p.m., with Ben Sisario, author of a Pixies Doolittle tome. (Kate Sullivan)

L.A. ALTERNATIVE, 2/3/2006

Author Kim Cooper gives us the Neutral Milk Hotel we always knew existed, by Evan George

If you listen closely to your favorite albums, occasionally you can hear the swish of traffic in the back of the mix. Sometimes it’s a conversation during the session or a serendipitously missed note in a solo. These secret moments are narcotic to a fan, like a glimpse into the recording studio, a backstage pass. But often, without the aid of a biographer privy to the inner circle, these sounds go completely unnoticed.

Kim Cooper has given me one of these moments. In the closing seconds of the lonely, acoustic opus “Oh Comely,” as someone at the mixing board is fading out, you can hear the band Neutral Milk Hotel and friends burst into cheers as an exuberant member yelps, “Holy shit!” after a seamlessly moving one-take by front man Jeff Magnum. Expecting only a 15-second sound-check, the group was wowed when Magnum came forth with the entirety of the song, clocking in at more than eight minutes of tortured warble and beauty on the spot. When pointed out, a two-second snippet like this can enrich appreciation for an album as secretive as In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

Hailing from Luston, Louisiana, Neutral Milk Hotel became an odd, outsider-rock sensation after the celebration of Aeroplane, their second full-length. Led by sole songwriter Magnum, they played low-fi, hi-ambience masterpieces with fuzzed out guitars, trumpet solos and poetry steeped in religious iconography and transformative magic that touched the spine of entranced listeners. After the accolades and impressive word-of-mouth publicity, Magnum chose to return to anonymity, retiring NMH for good. His last musical project involved traveling the Eastern Bloc, making field recordings of traditional Eastern European folk musicians for posterity’s sake.

Cooper’s 2005 book on NMH and Aeroplane (which shares a title with the album) is part of the 33 1/3 series that treats cult-classic albums like dissertation fodder, and hers does a particularly stellar job of demystifying—as much as possible—the destitute and devoted dudes behind Neutral Milk Hotel’s underground stardom.

As editor of Scram magazine and co-founder of the 1947 Project—a website devoted to the underbelly of L.A. history—Cooper levels her unflinching detective’s eye at the band. Through exhaustive interviews with the infamous recluses, she details everything from high school friendships to the humble beginnings of the preeminent ’90s indie label Elephant 6, and the touring that ultimately proved the last public appearance of the band. Unlike many of the other books in the celebrated series, her extensive analysis of the album’s origins and content is by no means the majority of the writing. Her strengths as a social historian lend this read a certain depth that most Spin writers could never muster. Somehow, she miraculously manages to do an album of this ilk—as resistant to the bitter end as it’s been to the spotlight—poetic justice.

On Wednesday, February 8th, Cooper will read selections from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea at Book Soup in West Hollywood.

L.A. Alternative: How’d you seize on Neutral Milk Hotel, a seemingly biography-averted band, to do this sort of book on, and how did the project come about?
Kim Cooper: Andrew Hultkrans, a contributor to David Smay’s and my anthology Lost in the Grooves, had written a 33 1/3 book about Love’s Forever Changes. The idea of the series was catnip for me, so I asked if he’d put me in touch with his editor, David Barker, which he did. David encouraged me to submit a wish list of albums I thought were worthy of a book, and I strung together a list of mainly psychedelic, folk and proto-punk disks… then at the last moment added two semi-recent albums, just so it wouldn’t seem like I was trapped in the past. One was Lolita Nation by Game Theory, the other In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. Using some mysterious editorial voodoo, David determined that Aeroplane and I might be a match, and he asked me to expound on that choice in a formal pitch. As I wrote the pitch, I realized I was much more excited about writing about this placeholder album than any of the ones I thought were my favorites, but which had already been subject to extensive analysis by dozens of other writers. I mean, really, what was I thinking, wanting to write about Astral Weeks in the wake of Lester Bangs?!

LAA: What was the interaction with 33 1/3 people like? Your book seems to read differently than many of the more analysis-driven ones. Was that a choice of yours, to not follow the standard format?
KC: Every (reasonably disciplined) writer should have an editor like David Barker. He didn’t inhibit or direct me in the slightest way, but made it clear that he wanted me to write the book I needed to write. I never did take him up on his offer to bounce partly written chapters off him—I’m private when I work. But he was always there with an open ear when I had a question, and made a few smart suggestions about tweaking the final manuscript, all of which I followed.

I didn’t know what form this book would take until I talked with the people who lived the album. Over the course of the interviews, it became clear that the story of Aeroplane was one of friendship and community, and that the voices of the players and their friends and their fans had to be integral to the book. Once these voices were slotted in, the story told itself.

LAA: In the book, you describe the supernatural reaction of fans to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. What was your first relationship with the band and that album, as a listener?
KC: I remember being very moved by the album. It’s easy to remember this feeling, because it has never left me. But I didn’t realize how much depth it had, or what a cool world it reflected, until doing this research. I liked NMH from the first album, but never made the effort to see them live—which, of course, I feel pretty foolish about now.

LAA: Is their a cult around Jeff Magnum that seems over-blown, or do you think more people should be exposed to this kind of album?
KC: I think Aeroplane deserves all the accolades it gets. If my book adds one idea to the common currency about the album, I hope it’s that this lovely piece of work is not something that can be purely credited to Jeff Mangum. The songs are his, but the production and arrangements, which have such power, are collaborations.