My Review Of "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea"

"This album is not cool." -Mark Richardson, September 26, 2005 (Writer at Pitchfork)

"I love you, Jesus Christ." -Jeff Mangum



Let's get this out of the way before I make another post.

I think that In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is a pretty awful album.

All this shit I hear about "OOH, IT'S A DREAM TRANSLATED INTO MUSIC. ANNE FRANK YALL TEE HEE" is a bunch of effing baloney. Why do people love and idolize this piece of shit? I think it's a pathetic husk of a freak-folk album that laid no tracks for the years of indie development to come. BrokenCyde takes better shits than this! (okay, that's hyperbole, but maybe Animal Collective does). Couldn't my brethren of the late '90s just have waited a year until The Soft Bulletin to come out 'til they found their crowning album? Hell, OK Computer was out by the time this came out. What happened to peoples tastes?



Jeff Mangum has to be one of the world's largest trolls. Look at that grin. He knows he got away with something, that reclusive fucker. He's like a two-bit Salinger.

The acclaim for this album seems to have also come at the turn of the decade. Pitchfork's original review gave it an 8.7, and then proceeded to fellate it with a perfect score after it got reissued. acclaimedmusic.net reports that it didn't pierce the top tens of any lists in 98. So why the love? Sure, ranking isn't everything, but how did an album this plainly acclaimed get so hyped posthumously? It doesn't make sense. I hope my generation hasn't made out Mangum and his cronies into false idols. Thank god they all quit the band. Actually I take that back, I would want them to sell out so that I could have a concrete foundation for hating them.

That's another problem: their disbanding. They come in, drop this shit, and pretty much back out. It's not like they were releasing new content that motivated people to look back in their discography. This makes the conundrum all the more confusing. There must be some kind of hipster version of the Evil Deceiver tricking people into thinking this shlock is good, and subjecting the rest of us to one of indie's greatest pains: barring from the esotericism. I refuse to believe that this is "too deep for me". Something terrible was afoot, and it left many of my fellow hipsters conned, still to this day.



Shame on you, Win Butler, for appreciating this album. You should know that Arcade Fire shits all over any of Neutral Milk Hotel's endeavors. Stand tall and proud, for you deserve the pilfered crown that sits on Mangum's hideous bowlcut head.



Yet, perhaps it's not so bad that this album was made. If bands and artists were truly inspired by this, then it has led them to create some of the great music we have today. However, I don't see how we can't leave this obsolete record behind and time and forget about it.

Also, I wish it wasn't posted on /mu/ every FUCKING day.



That's all I suppose. And if I sounded like a dick, then GOOD.