This is a fantastic idea for a thread! We ought to build a database that rivals the Allmusic Guide.

I have a backlog of short blurbs on a lot of albums I love somewhere on my computer. I hope to get them up soon.

Great thread, lubeck and I'm looking forward to read all the reviews.

I have so many favourite albums - new ones and old ones. Each album has my personal memory and some of them are just like good friends. I don't need to pick them up every month, but they're always there when I need them.

Can the nonsensical be frightening? That is the first of many questions that come to mind when listening to this bizarre album. At first glance, lead singer Jeff Magnum's lyrics are bafflingly random, disjointed, and defy exegesis. But on closer inspection, the words are a series of terrifyingly morbid images of people living in abject misery, with people sticking forks into each other's shoulders and fingers into others' spines, and worse. And yet all of this is set to catchy melodies sung in a voice that's not quite humorous and not quite deadpan (but definitely quite annoying), but is a discombobulating mixture of both, leaving you unsure of whether to laugh nervously or recoil in horror. But this revelation doesn't make the album easier to interpret; rather, it just muddies the picture even more.

And then there's the awful production. All of the instruments are as abused as the Two-Headed Boy and The King of Carrot Flowers and every other character unfortunate enough to feature on this record. They're so distorted that it's as if you're listening to the album through a brick bubble that's enveloped your head. But that's hardly the worst part of it. This album is one of the most hellishly loud albums I've had the misfortune to hear in my life. Opening track "The King of Carrot Flowers, Pt 1" is so dynamically compressed and distorted that every strum of the acoustic guitar is like being repeatedly stabbed with a knife in both eardrums. Every utterance of vocals is like having your brain crushed between the walls of the Death Star trash compactor. Every drum hit is like an anvil being dropped on your skull. And that's how the band must've wanted it. By way of sound waves, you, the listener, share in the characters' misery.

Because of the above, I find In the Aeroplane over the Sea a very difficult listen, and I can hardly listen to more than three of these songs at once. But despite its gruesome subject matter and near-unlistenability, I find Neutral Milk Hotel's opus endlessly fascinating, and I keep coming back for more. But why? Why am I not immediately repulsed by songs about fathers making fetuses with flesh-licking ladies? Rather than doing a meaningful introspection, I'm gonna cop out and blame society at large. Because you never know what a meaningful introspection might uncover. *laughs evilly* We humans have a strange obsession with the grotesque. But why is that? Why do we focus on the sick minds of serial killers and mass murderers rather than empathizing with the victims of such atrocities? Because, deep down, we all know there's a monster inside all of us, desperate to manifest itself by driving us to do the unspeakable. It's just that some of us are better at controlling it than others. And that's (probably) the reason that I keep returning to In the Aeroplane over the Sea, waiting to be beguiled and shocked by its many surprises.

And then you find out it's about the Holocaust. Ahhh!!!!