【搬运/翻译】Pitchfork乐评
原作者：Mark Richardson；原文发表时间：2005年9月26日；p4k评分：10分满分。
So, then, seven years later Domino reissues In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the arguments can begin anew. I've talked about this album with a lot of people, including Pitchfork readers and music writers, and while it is loved in the indie world like few others, a small but still significant number despise it. Aeroplane doesn't have the near-consensus of top-shelf 90s rock artifacts like, say, Loveless, OK Computer, or Slanted and Enchanted. These records are varied, of course, different in many ways. But in one key respect Aeroplane stands apart: This album is not cool.
那么，七年之后，Domino唱片公司再版了《In the Aeroplane Over the Sea》，与之相关的讨论也可以重新开始了。我和很多人聊过这张专辑，包括Pitchfork的读者和乐评人。这张专辑在独立音乐界广受欢迎，和其他几张名盘一样，然而还是有一小撮人瞧不来这张，人数不多，但很扎眼。《Aeroplane》没能获得一致好评，不像那些九十年代的顶流摇滚专辑（比如《Loveless》《OK Computer》《Slanted & Enchanted》）。这些专辑当然在很多方面都各有特色。但跟它们相比，《Aeroplane》有一大重要特点：这张专辑不“酷”。
Shortly after the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Puncture magazine had a cover story on Neutral Milk Hotel. In it Mangum told of the influence on the record of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. He explained that shortly after releasing On Avery Island he read the book for the first time, and found himself completely overwhelmed with sadness and grief. Back in 1998 this admission made my jaw drop. What the hell? A guy in a rock band saying he was emotionally devastated by a book everyone else in America read for a middle-school assignment? I felt embarrassed for him at first, but then, the more I thought about it and the more I heard the record, I was awed. Mangum's honesty on this point, translated directly to his music, turned out to be a source of great power.
《In the Aeroplane Over the Sea》发行后不久，Puncture杂志刊登了一期封面故事，讲的就是Neutral Milk Hotel。在这篇文章中，Mangum讲述了《安妮日记》对这张专辑的影响。他说《On Avery Island》发行后不久，他第一次读到这本书，结果沉浸在悲哀中不可自拔。1998年我听说这件事时，惊讶得掉下巴。这他妈什么鬼？一个玩摇滚的人说他被一本美国中学生课堂必读书搞得情绪崩溃？我一开始还替他尴尬，但之后，我想得越多，我听这张专越多，我就越佩服他。Mangum的真挚感情倒成为强大的创作灵感，转化成他的音乐。
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a personal album but not in the way you expect. It's not biography. It's a record of images, associations, and threads; no single word describes it so well as the beautiful and overused "kaleidoscope." It has the cracked logic of a dream, beginning with "King of Carrot Flowers Part 1". The easiest song on the record to like on first listen, it quietly introduces the listener to the to the album's world, Mangum singing in a muted voice closer to where he left off with the more restrained On Avery Island (through most of Aeroplane he sounds like he's running out of time and struggling to get everything said). The first four words are so important: "When you were young..." Like every perceptive artist trafficking in memory, Mangum knows dark surrealism to be the language of childhood. At a certain age the leap from kitchen utensils jammed into dad's shoulder to feet encircled by holy rattlesnakes is nothing. A cock of the head; a squint, maybe.
《In the Aeroplane Over the Sea》是一张私人化的专辑，但不是你想的那种私人化，它不是个人传记。这是一张由画面、联想和思绪组成的专辑，只有一个很美但也被滥用的词能准确描绘出这张专辑：万花筒。这张专辑有着梦境般破碎的逻辑。开场曲是“King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1”，这张专里最容易入耳的歌，静静地引着听众进入这张专辑里的世界。在这首歌里，Mangum轻轻的歌声反而像更克制的专辑《On Avery Island》（唱《Aeroplane》里的大部分歌时，他都像是快没时间了，尽力要把所有的话说完）。前四个字非常重要：“你还小时...”就像每个在记忆获取素材的敏感艺术家一样，曼格姆把黑暗超现实主义当作童年的语言。从插进爸爸肩膀的厨房用具，到被神圣响尾蛇缠绕的脚，这么大跨度的跳跃在童年时似乎也没什么，不过是抬一抬头，或是瞥一眼这么简单的事吧。
Inside this dream it all begins in the body. Moments of trauma, joy, shame-- here they're all experienced first as physical sensation. A flash of awkward intimacy is recalled as "now how I remember you/ how I would push my fingers through your mouth/ to make those muscles move." Sometimes I hear this line and chuckle. I think of Steve Martin in The Jerk, licking Bernadette Peters' entire face as a sign of affection. Mangum here reflects the age when biological drives outpace the knowledge of what to do with them, a time you're seeing sex in everything ("semen stains the mountaintops") or that sex can be awkward and unintentionally painful ("fingers in the notches of your spine" is not what one usually hopes for in the dark). Obsessed as it is with the textures of the flesh and the physical self as an emotional antenna, listening to Aeroplane sometimes seems to involve more than just your ears.
我们就从这场梦里进入专辑的主体。那些快乐、创伤、羞愧的时刻，一开始都以肉体感觉的形式为我们所体验。比如亲密感在这里就表达为：“现在我还能想起/我将手指伸进你的嘴里/去挑动那些肌肉。”有时我听见这几句会轻轻地笑。我想象着《大笨蛋》里的史蒂夫·马丁，为了表达爱意舔着伯纳黛特·彼得斯的脸。在这些歌里Mangum表现的是那个我们由于知识不够而对生理冲动不知所措的年纪，在这年纪里你处处都能看到性暗示（“山顶上沾了jing液”）这个年纪里的性可能还是笨拙的，甚至是痛苦的（“手指戳进你脊椎的缝里”可不是人们在黑暗里想要的）。这张令人着迷的专辑里藏着人体的质感、作为感情接收器的肉身。所以聆听这张专辑用到的似乎不仅仅是耳朵。
Then there's the record's disorienting relationship to time. The instrumentation seems plucked randomly from different years in the 20th century: singing saws, Salvation Army horn arrangements, banjo, accordion, pipes. Lyrical references to technology are hard to fix. Anne Frank's lifespan from 1929 to 1945 is perhaps the record's historical center, but the perspective jumps back and forth over centuries, with images and figures sucked from their own age and squirted out somewhere else. When "The King of Carrot Flowers Part 3" mentions "a synthetic flying machine" our minds leap to something like Leonardo da Vinci's 15th Century drawings of his helicopter prototype. The image in "Two-Headed Boy" of a mutant child trapped in a jar of formaldehyde is pulled from Dr. Moreau's industrial age island. The radio play powered by pre-electric pulleys and weights, the nuclear holocaust in the title track. What's it all about? Mangum offers an explanation for these jarring leaps in a line about Anne Frank in "Oh Comely," where he sings, "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." If you can move through time, see, nothing ever really dies.
这张专辑的时间顺序是错乱的。用到的乐器好像是从二十世纪的不同时间点随便抽来的：锯琴、救世军军号*、班卓琴、手风琴、风笛。歌词中提到的科学技术很难说是哪个时代的。安妮·弗兰克生于1929年，死于1945年，这段时间可能是这张专辑的历史定位中心。但专辑中歌曲的视角跨越了几个世纪，画面和人物从他们自己的时代被吸走，又被喷到另一个时代。歌曲“The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 3”提到一种“人造飞行器”，这时我们可以想到十五世纪达芬奇对他的飞行器的草稿。“Two-Headed Boy”描绘了一个发生变异的小孩，他被泡在装满福尔马林的大玻璃瓶里，这种画面就像是《拦截人魔岛》里的一样。由前电力时代的动滑轮和砝码驱动的收音机、专辑同名曲中的原子弹大屠杀。这些东西要表达什么？在“Oh Comely”中有一句关于安妮·弗兰克的歌词，其中Mangum给这些跳跃性的意象作了解释，他唱道：“我知道他们把她和别人一起埋葬了/她的姐姐、她的妈妈，还有其他五百户人家/五十年后她还能记得我吗/我多么希望我能坐着时光机去把她救下。”如果你能穿梭时空，那么，万事万物都不会逝去了。
*在CD专辑内页没有出现这个乐器，而是flugelhorn，活塞军号。
Seven years it's been, and whether Mangum has had personal trouble or somehow lost his way with music, it's not unreasonable to think that we've heard the last from Neutral Milk Hotel. I hope he does, but he may never pick up the guitar he set down after "Two-Headed Boy Part Two." Even so, we have this album and another very good one, and that to me is serious riches. Amazing to think how it started, how at the core of it all was guts. I keep thinking of "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding," and one of Dylan's truest lines: "If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine." Aeroplane is what happens when you have that knowledge and still take the risk.
自专辑发行已经过了七年，无论Mangum是遇到了困难，还是出了其他问题他放下了音乐事业，这张专大概就是Neutral Milk Hotel的绝响了。虽然我不希望如此，但他似乎不会再拿起他在“Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2”结尾放下的吉他了。但是，我们仍然拥有这张专辑，还有另一张不错的，这对我来说就已经很不错了。想想这张专是怎么开始的，它的核心都是真情实感，我就觉得真了不起。我屡屡想到鲍勃·迪伦的歌“It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding”，其中有他最真挚的歌词之一：“如果我苦苦思索的梦想被看穿/他们可能要将我推上断头台。”《Aeroplane》就是你明知有困难却要执意冒险后，所得到的东西。
- 表演者: Neutral Milk Hotel
- 发行时间: 1998
- 流派: 民谣
- 出版者: Merge Records
- 专辑类型: CD / Import