Cooper characterises Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea as a perennial strong-selling album, but one discovered by word of mouth, trading among fellow enthusiasts, and not from a particularly high profile. That squares with my experience: I'd heard of the album well before hearing it, and when I finally did it was years after it had been released. The recording of it was a years-long project, bringing together many musicians and performers around Jeff Mangum, and culminating in a tour and recording session. Based on Cooper's description, the creativity leading to the album was almost all-encompassing for Mangum especially, but also many of those involved in it. Many of them were roommates in various cities.

This is more a biographical than an interpretive essay, surveying members, happenings, recording and rehearsals, some songwriting and touring, and the album's reception. There is a little on lyrical interpretation and sonic descriptions, but Cooper consciously limits this. The reference to Anne Frank's diary as the central motif was enlightening, I'd caught lyrical references but didn't identify them as key to the song cycle overall. Cooper is a fan and takes it as given that the album is great, that most people reading about it know it's great, but everyone will have their idiosyncratic reasons. This works well for the album and the band, actually, and likewise then for the essay.

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The songs stick to one narrow key, the images repeat and circle back, and to listen is to be absorbed into a singular, heartrending vision. [2]

Cooper doesn't expand on this observation of key, and my listening skill isn't equal to the question of which key that is (or to corroborate it is, in fact, the same key). If it is true, it doesn't translate to the album lacking an emotional arc, despite the Western convention of beginning in one key, shifting to one or more others (never clear to me which others "sound" right and which not), and then return to the tonic. Though perhaps Cooper's statement doesn't preclude the shifting to different keys, so long as each song is rooted in that same key? ( )

Wonderful exposition on one of my absolute favorite albums. I really appreciate that Kim Cooper focused on the scene and Jeff's relationship with the musicians around him rather than trying to interpret the meanings of the lyrics. And the closing quote from Julian Koster was a poignant summation of that time period. ( )

Kim Cooper's 33 1/3 entry on the Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea shouldn't be considered definitive: heck, an entire book -- or maybe a blog -- could be written about just the album's influence on its fans' lives. Still, it seems like she spent a good deal of time with many of the people who contributed significantly to this album's creation, and much of her research likely preserved a lot of you-had-to-be-there storytelling that might have been lost otherwise. There are interesting bits on Robert Schnieder's role as producer and unofficial band member and entertaining stories about how the loose, energetic collective that was Elephant 6 recordings held together and provided its members with a lot of mutual support and encouragement. I think that Cooper's book will probably appeal most to rock listeners who like to think of bands as alchemical experiments of a sort and albums as the unique products of specific times, places, scenes and people that fall together more or less at random and are helped along by a lot of effort and a little luck. This book provides a pretty good snapshot of one bunch of talented people -- arranged around the appealingly sincere, still rather withdrawn figure of Jeff Mangum -- who came together to create something really extraordinary. ( )

I felt like this captured a lot of information about the band, the locales, and the album without distilling the life from it, which I was worried about. This book covers the early years of the band, as kids in Ruston, and the Elephant 6 Collective up until recently. I love that it is written by a person who had/has a zine. It has that feel to it, which brought back all sorts of awesome, pre-everything-is-online memories. It actually rekindled my excitement about this album, which is my all-time favorite. The magic of all of the participants making art and music with one person sort of at the center comes across very well. I could have done without the lyrical interpretations, but that is a personal thing. ( )

Love the band, the book's ok. ( )