Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is the second studio album by American rock band Neutral Milk Hotel, originally released in February 1998 via Merge Records.

Rising from the flames of Louisiana's 'crazy psychedelic Christianity' and smouldering bayous, comes the re-release of Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

Neutral Milk Hotel were drawn together as teenage friends to make music, propelled by the imaginary force of Jeff Mangum, making music in bedrooms with a universe of instruments. With members of Olivia Tremor Control and Apples in Stereo they formed the Elephant 6, dispersed, re-arranged and created Neutral Milk Hotel.

Shunning the mainstream and performing rarely to the dismay of fans meant that 'Aeroplane' never received its due exposure. The album  is impossible to define in terms of time or scene its other-worldly music and lyrics could easily have been the soundtrack to the 1900s dreamscape film "A Trip to the Moon" with human-faced moons and rockets, Comparable to being on a Ferris Wheel with an orchestra of trumpets, zanzithiphones, uillean pipes, accordions and shortwave radio fuzz: the result is heady and exhilarating but there is a darkness underlying this exuberant ecstasy, as though you can hear Tom Waits conducting 'The Black Rider' in a far off circus tent.

Aeroplane Over The Sea went on to receive critical acclaim, and is described by music journalists as a landmark album for indie rock and as one of the best albums of the 1990s. This album has been cited as an inspiration to bands such as Arcade Fire, Caribou and Franz Ferdinand.

This album is a 2024 repress on black vinyl housed in a gatefold sleeve with a printed inner sleeve and download, pressed in US via Merge Records.