Posts are going to be light around here for a while, but just wanted to pass this along. Berkeley Place posted the top 25 “indie” rock albums ever, at least according to a poll of music bloggers. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over The Sea is #1, which is hard to argue against. They posted a bunch of live mp3s from NMH, which is always nice but there is especially excellent live version of “Oh Comely” that’s worth checking out.
“Oh Comely” is the most overwhelming song on Aeroplane; at first the words and images come too fast to even comprehend them. I still marvel at how Jeff Magnum even gets the words out. Even after repeated listens, the sexual imagery of fetuses and ovaries and semen and green fleshy flowers and fat fleshy fingers still makes me squirm in my seat. And then the songs shifts and reaches its pinnacle in this one heartbreaking, stunning verse:
And I know they buried her body with others
Her sister and mother and 500 families
And will she remember me 50 years later
I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine
Know all your enemies
We know who our enemies are.
If you listen carefully to the end of the album version of “Oh, Comely” you can hear someone yell “ho-ly shit!” at the very end of Magnum’s performance. I couldn’t have put it any better.
Neutral Milk Hotel – Oh, Comely from In the Aeroplane Over The Sea (1998)
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