In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

It’s impossible to ever truly know In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It’s been compared to T.S Eliot‘s The Wasteland, in the sense that it’s a labyrinthine work that can be endlessly analysed but never completely understood. A miasma of fiction and memory, it shifts continually; a Phantasmagoria whirling through a thousand mystifying images, one minute raw and confessional, the next exhilarating and eccentric. Recorded during storms and semi-destitution, it has a unique combination of the intimate and the unreal, that makes it impossible to either simply like or dislike. It inspires hatred or adoration with every atom of your being. And in an age of diet soul and mortgage rock, we need such extremes. Theodore Adorno wrote that after the Holocaust, there can be no poetry. He was wrong. There must be, all the more so. And this, in eleven tracks like nothing else in recorded music, is the proof. Darran Anderson on Neutral Milk Hotel.