Part 4: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - Watching Lightning Strike
It was 1998. I was sitting in my apartment. The phone rang.
Hello.
Come over right now. I found someone who’s a better songwriter than J. Mascus.
Impossible.
I hung up and left. An eight-minute walk later I sat on the edge of my friend’s mattress. He lifted the needle and reset it. We listened.
I picked up the jacket. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It sounded like an adventure—uninhibited in every respect. The vocals were bodacious yet vulnerable. Jeff Mangum’s voice pitched and cracked with emotional impudence. He did not seem bothered by what his voice could or could not do with proficiency—allowing the emotions of the song to dictate tone and pitch rather than ascribing to standardized rules. Rather than setting the key of a song within range, the key was raised just beyond reach. Where another singer may have been embarrassed by their vocal limit: Mangum exploited it.
The same devise was applied to the instrumentation. Every sound was used to evoke an emotional response. The use of Theremin and organ added haunting palpability to modern rock cord progressions. The slow dirge of horns and tambourine and snare drum rolls of The Fool evoked images of death in sepia. What began with clean and clear acoustic guitar tones, by the end of side A, was blown out past the point of distortion. The bombastic strumming of Holland, 1945 sounded like it was playing through blown speakers. Affecting acoustical sound, it was cacophonous, truly oxymoronic. And beautiful. Bleedingly beautiful.
Thematically it was no different. Spousal abuse, mass graves, reincarnation, apparitions of Anne Frank, marital infidelities in trailer parks, were among the scope of topics retrieved from oblivion like gems by a grave robber. What was beautiful about the macabre scenes, such as, being buried alive with your sister, was that there were beautiful stories dying with these characters, if only they could be unearthed, if only they could be resuscitated.
This album did what I thought only novels could do. It brought the entire world into the square-footage of your bedroom. It was a history of ancestors’ life experiences and personal childhood memories; yet it was so common—so relative.
How could an album contradict itself in so many ways and yet achieve equilibrium: impudent/vulnerable, bombastic/comforting, morbid/beautiful, unfamiliar/applicable. For me, it stretched the limits of what a rock record could be, from which there could be no recoil.
