In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Forty minutes, and the subtractive test mostly fails to find a removable part. The King of Carrot Flowers must open: a childhood in a broken house, the home the rest of the record flies out of. The title song states the creed; Two-Headed Boy and its Part Two are the frame, and the closer cannot stand without the first. Holland, 1945 is the hinge where the dead girl is named by place and date. Oh Comely runs over eight minutes, and its length is its content. The test bites in three places: The Fool breathes but restates, the untitled instrumental is the most separable minute, and Communist Daughter is a strong image under-built, its drone coda longer than it needs. Three soft spots in eleven hold the figure, none of them filler.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: love is felt for the dead as for the living, the grief of history is personal or it is nothing, and to have a body at all, to be born, to rot and to desire, is strange past bearing and still to be loved. The title song says it outright, in a line on how strange it is to be “anything at all”. Holland, 1945 carries a girl of the war into a lover’s address; Oh Comely sets sex, fathers, birth and death in one long breath; Two-Headed Boy, Pt. Two ends on letting go. It is held below the gate because the statement is often veiled by private imagery, the history is entered through one girl rather than understood, and some of what listeners take as meaning is projection the obscurity invites.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Elevation is the record’s chief power, warm, ecstatic and near to breaking, and it comes often. The title song’s waltz, singing saw and brass rise almost to a hymn. Holland, 1945 is elevation at speed, fuzzed guitar and brass charging under a voice at the top of its range. Oh Comely reaches the summit by endurance, eight minutes of a voice straining and the horns entering near the end. Ghost climbs; The King of Carrot Flowers turns from domestic ruin to a shouted love of Christ that is transport and joke at once; Two-Headed Boy, Pt. Two lifts at its close and falls to silence. The Fool is grave rather than high, and Communist Daughter dissolves into drone. Height on seven or eight of eleven, the top very high; the rawness that carries it sometimes topples into strain.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Myth is built more than evoked, and its figures bear it. The dead girl is particular, a Dutch girl of the war with a sister, in a place and a year, and she becomes the beloved who must be restored, the Eurydice the singer cannot bring back. The two-headed boy in his jar, a sideshow specimen, becomes the self divided and preserved, singing to the girl through glass. Resurrection runs through the whole: seeds in the ground, the dead rising, the ghost of Ghost, Christ addressed in the opening song. The flight over the sea in the title holds it. What holds the axis below the gate is that the links stay private: the girl, the boy and the singer are never set into one story the listener can trace, so the structure is felt more than built.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is American lo-fi indie rock of the 1990s and the psychedelic pop of the Elephant 6 collective, the Apples in Stereo and Olivia Tremor Control, with the Beach Boys and the Beatles of the late 1960s behind them and the folk singers of the voice alone. The turn is real. Mangum sets a fuzz-saturated acoustic guitar, a singing saw and a brass band under songs earnest past embarrassment in a decade that prized irony, and makes a girl killed in the Holocaust the object of a love song. The stake is bathos at every turn, a sincerity the field could have laughed off. What holds it below the gate is the path: the lo-fi means were proven by Daniel Johnston and Guided by Voices, the collective’s studio and producer were in place, and the band’s own first album had begun the manner.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows. The saturation is not decoration: a voice and guitar recorded too close and too loud are the sound of feeling that cannot be held at a distance, and the record knows that grief and love for the dead come in that register or not at all. The sequence, counted here once, is a cycle: a childhood house, the creed, the boy in the jar, then the war, sex and death, the ghost, a wordless lament, and the boy again at the end, who now lets go. The Two-Headed Boy pair frame the last two-thirds; the instrumentals stand as breaths, one in each half. Oh Comely’s unbroken length enacts its subject. What holds it short of 9 is that the links between songs are thematic, not musical: several could change places without the record knowing less.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over twenty-eight years. The record has sustained a long and still active exegesis, much of it among listeners rather than critics: annotated lyrics, arguments over who the girl is and who the boy is, over what Communist Daughter and Oh Comely mean. Musicians still learn and cover the songs. The yield is semantic first: the images are dense and the connections withheld, and return keeps finding new links between girl, boy, seed and ghost. The formal yield is thinner; the arrangements are simple and give up their secrets quickly. Some of the yield is the obscurity’s own: a record that withholds its links invites projection, which is not depth. A tenth below Remain in Light at 8.5, and four tenths below Low at 8.8.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The field is American and British indie and alternative music of the late 1990s. The intrinsic force is moderate: the record did not invent a language; it recombined lo-fi recording, psychedelic pop arrangement, folk song and a brass band, and its new thing was a register, an unguarded sincerity and a willingness to be grand on small means. That reorganises tone more than possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record grew through the internet in the early 2000s, and its earnestness, its brass and accordion and its cracked voice became a template for the indie folk and chamber pop of the following decade. Arcade Fire, the Decemberists and Bright Eyes are commonly named; the pattern is credited, not any single debt. The reach is large and delayed, and is discounted for the delay.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Survival is weighed over twenty-eight years. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has been repressed on vinyl. Presence is real: the record became more heard after its maker withdrew than before, it is heard whole rather than as a single, and the band’s reunion tours of 2013 to 2015 filled halls with listeners born after it was made. That presence is wide within a large listening public of its kind rather than the widest, and it owes something to a mystique of withdrawal, which is presence, not proof. The fabric bears its moment lightly: the lo-fi sound was chosen against its decade’s gloss and already sounded old on release, so it has not dated as a production fashion dates. It meets the gate exactly.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, read against the desk’s elder anchors, is real and limited. Schneider’s recording catches a room and a voice with a closeness that carries the content; the distortion on guitar and voice is chosen; brass, saw and organ are placed so that a handful of players sound like a band of twenty on the title song and Holland, 1945. Scott Spillane’s horn arrangements are the finest making on the record, simple and exactly weighted, and Mangum’s songs hold strong melodies on three or four chords. What holds it lowest of the eleven: the singing is often under pitch and at the edge of control, and the strain is not always chosen; the guitar playing is rudimentary; Communist Daughter, Ghost and the untitled piece are thick rather than exact; the saturation clips in places. Low stands at 9.0 here.

Score: 7.8 / 10

One law governs the record: the body and the dead held in one ecstatic grief, sung too close and too loud. The two most distant elements obey it. The Fool is a slow brass dirge without a word; Holland, 1945 is fuzz-punk at speed; both are laments, one grave and one in a rush, and both use the same brass. The King of Carrot Flowers, a family’s ruin seen by a child, and Two-Headed Boy, Pt. Two, a voice letting a dead girl go, obey the same law of love spoken past what it can bear. The range is fair: folk song, waltz, march, drone, punk, lament. The law strains in two places: the drones of Communist Daughter and the untitled piece obey it as atmosphere more than statement, and the shouted Christ of the opening sits ironically against the later sincerity.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, in a voice that is almost all the record is. The family is held, in the broken house of the opening, a father and a mother, and in Oh Comely’s fathers. Sexuality and the body are held throughout, as desire, as rot and as seed. History enters through the Second World War and a girl killed in it, held through one person. The sacred is present, Christ and the rising of the dead; the natural order enters as seed, soil, flower and sea. Labour, the state and the city are absent, and politics is glimpsed in a title. That absence is what holds the figure lowest; the orders present are joined by one voice’s love and grief, integrated rather than listed, and the history held through one girl keeps it from lower.

Score: 7.5 / 10