There are at least two ways to tell the story of how I came to listen to this album:
(1) I've loved "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" - the song - for ages, its giddy, melancholy, wide-eyed, amazed, arms-outstretched joyful everythingness always having done it for me...if there's ever been a song which expressed how wonderful and strange it is to be anything at all, this is it. So, given that I'd heard the album described as a classic, naturally I'd have gotten round to listening to the lp one day.
(2) Last weekend, Kelly set me up with a stack of music, much to my delight; there's heaps and I'm savouring the idea of listening to it all properly, but it was In The Aeroplane Over The Sea which most immediately excited me, partly because I've wanted to listen to it for so long and partly because it's a favourite of hers...
But in any case:
At first, the album didn't grab me - it was rawer and more lo-fi and, on initial listens at least, more abrasive than I expected and I basically wasn't feeling it. Successive listens opened things up more, gradually, but this morning (grey, cold, glomming around at home getting ready to go out) the album really caught hold of me, and when it did, it was as if all the pieces had fallen into place at once - something stole over me and then all at once it seemed as if I could just see how the album fit together as a whole (both in a song-by-song sense, and as far as the overall slotting-together of its constituent elements goes), and concurrently with that a realisation of how good the record is...a strange feeling, and difficult to describe, but one which somehow bore with it a very strong feeling of rightness...
So anyway, I was out this afternoon, but I've been listening to it end to end since I got home,[*] and I do feel that there's something a bit special about the album. In trying to make sense of these things, I'm often reminded of that deceptively simple Kate Bush lyric, call and response: "Why should I love you?/ There's just something about you", and that's how it feels with In The Aeroplane Over The Sea - there's something going on in the spaces between the notes which binds it together and renders it amazing. Now that I've entered into its world, it keeps me with a lump in my throat more or less the whole way through, and I feel as if its rhythms --
-- from the skewed build-up of the scene-setting "King of Carrot Flowers" suite through the renewal and loss of the title track and the melodic dirge that is "Two-Headed Boy", to the mournful New Orleans brass-band waltz of "The Fool", stormy garage rock 'n' roll rave-up "Holland, 1945", end-of-day introspective "Communist Daughter", almost unbearably sad acoustic strumalong epic "Oh Comely" (intimating the end that's to come), and fuzzed-out "Ghost" (kicking out the rock and roll jams again with a cunning, constantly ascending feel), and then on to the skirling swirl of the untitled penultimate song and, finally, magnificently desolate closer "Two-Headed Boy, Pt. 2" --
-- have written themselves inside me, or something, so that there's a kind of inevitability in its rises and falls, as well as a feeling of wholeness. Melodies recur, overtly and subliminally, and the horns serve as punctuation and signposts along the way, taking on a different complexion each time they reappear; Jeff Mangum's voice reaches and frays and expresses and one always feels as things are going to fly apart at any moment, but they never quite do.
Anyway, evidently I'm writing this in what's basically still the first flush of enthusiasm, so I don't know what effect In The Aeroplane... will continue to have on me once I've lived with it for a bit longer, but oh it's good right now...
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[*] (I wrote all this last night but only got round to posting this morning.)
