In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is the second and final studio album by American rock band Neutral Milk Hotel, released on February 10th, 1998 on Blue Rose Records.
The album is largely inspired by Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, a diary she kept while hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Jeff Magnum wrote many of the lyrics about her, as he had just finished reading it. Regarding it, he said:
Then I spent two days reading it and completely flipped out … spent about three days crying … it stuck with me for a long, long time.
The music is very hard to categorize into a specific genre, but many have described it as indie rock, psychedelic folk and lo-fi, with influences from Eastern European choral music, Canterbury, musique concrète, drone music, free jazz, and Tropicália.
Paste magazine ranked this album as the second-best of the 1990s and Treble magazine ranked the album as the best of 1998.
Track Listing:
A1 The King Of Carrot Flowers Pt. One
A2 The King Of Carrot Flowers Pts. Two & Three
A3 In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
A4 Two-Headed Boy
A5 The Fool
A6 Holland, 1945
A7 Communist Daughter
B1 Oh Comely
B2 Ghost
B3 Untitled
B4 Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two
Year of Production: 1998
