Aeroplane, 1929

History is apocryphal. We learn our lessons with the waxing of a slow build, and then we step back ? never as far back as we should ? to see our own monuments, self-built and forged in the heat of early days when we were awake and endeavoring. We apply words like Christmas tree ornaments, fussing for something elemental that is bone-hidden and indescribable. History is pointillism, stabs of color left in an order building toward a narrative, toward an anecdote for our children, a story about how a war ended, the stroke of a brush or the words to a song.

The very struggle for history has become noble, the act of clearing away the dust to find the carved figures we always hoped weren't there, and we must value the artists who remind us, who dig for that darker soil.

Attic & Cellar is the last album that Aeroplane, 1929 will release. It is the last statement they must make, and in some ways, its words are so irrevocable, so permanent that we are forced to welcome the death that must follow. The four men that have always made up Aeroplane, 1929 began as boys, and they experimented wildly with a music they were still fighting to understand and control. Their first album is full of interruptions, a pop song split in two by a sudden burst of static, a violin or an organ or a voice disembodied. A growth of squeaks and murmurs, the fitful sleep of restless ambition. Their final album is an afternoon step out onto a field soft enough that you can feel the world turn beneath you, but on feet sure enough not to be thrown from it. It is a deathbed speech that alights to a cue from pianos and cellos and trumpets and two-dozen voices, and we'll walk into history humming it. The right words are spoken for the right moment, and a band obsessed with history, coughing it out around the dust that is perhaps waist-high now, has left us its artifact.

The band formed in 2005 and slowly took on its careful points of color. Attention is drawn to Alex Mazzaferro, well over six feet tall, singing in a thoughtful and reedy baritone that slides into tenor, the way we wake up tired knees. It makes for the kind of contrast that history loves, then, to see the diminutive Jacob Goldman next to him, shorter by close to a foot. On any Aeroplane, 1929 song you can hear the idyllic dueling with the synthetic ? a prairie guitar beneath sylvan strings, something American and something Classic, like a bronzed apple. From the start, they recorded their albums themselves, long summer months on the third floor of a New Haven colonial, building and breaking, pasting up and stripping away. They stayed locked in that New England attic until the following fall, when they were possibly the best band I'd ever seen. Alex, Jacob, Noah, and Wil had stumbled upon a new idiom, had dug up from the old dirt an aesthetic of their own, made new by the very act of its digging.

They grew up with their arms deep underground ? down an earthen well or a makeshift grave ? and each year they came up with something new out of that oak-paneled upstairs: the giddy pop-collage of To Persevere, followed by the stoic, almost minimalist, but no less audacious The Holy Ghost. The individual grew universal; the political, personal. Alex left home, or maybe just arrived there, and his songs came to envelop the American Dream and the American Nightmare. He reached for his roots, decided he liked the feel of fingers on strings instead. Where they once stuttered and bayed, Wil's drums leapt into an antebellum march; Noah's guitar didn't howl, it mourned in a sliding keen. Jacob brought space this time, a canyon hollow darkness for the band to play into, and they filled it with what they felt. The climax of The Holy Ghost's opening track, ?Locomotives? erupts when Alex frantically reveals, ?I've got the red, white, and blues...? and the band lurches into an anxious, burlesqued interpretation of ?The Star-Spangled Banner? These are the words of a man grown feverish, terrified, dizzy with injustice ? aching, as he explains elsewhere, ?for a way to making a living that [doesn't] get blood on [his] hands;" the haunting nighttime meridian of those bright bugles made manifest. Aeroplane, 1929 had indeed unearthed something, but it would take time for them to make head or foot of it.

The poems Alex wrote could have laid buried in some dresserdrawer; Jacob's increasingly complex compositions could have stayed pristine in their soaring heights; but thrust together, their work became something fascinating, something so real as to be impossible to ignore. Not the high- and low-art provocation that has made this decade impossible to see with straight eyes, but a reassurance that the two worlds need never have been separate in the first place. When a lilting mellotron ? at once organic and electronic ? spools around Alex's plaintive and, for the first time, fully mature vocals on the title track from the band's third release Original Sin, we can hear a sympathy between the two creators that is honestly touching. Although he phrases it in the close-framed first-person, Alex's seemingly non-sequiturial declaration that, ?This is my typewriter; it ain't yours, / and I don't believe in Original Sin? positions his faith in a mankind that has too long regarded itself as innately depraved in the context of this blossoming artistic collaboration. The typewriter ? the very engine of that personal-political aesthetic ? is not his but theirs. Those words are punctuated by a melodic tenderness that brings to mind devotion, love ? something we struggle for, with animal fear. Alex was twenty when this song was recorded, Jacob still in high school. Wil Mulhern and Noah Goldman, their ages nestled inbetween, matched its care with an understanding and deftness that is admirable and stunning. And when the songs were finally documented and it was time to take them on the road each summer, these bonds grew stronger still.

Books began seeping in, literature that Alex had worked knee-deep in for years informed a new lyrical project: to capture that which we all know. One can hear the graveyard whistling of Cormac McCarthy or Flannery O'Connor in the very fiber of Attic & Cellar ? an album set in a violent, high-stakes ?Old Testament America,? which is the closest this writer can come to a title as perfect as the one Alex chose. But he pushed further, into the Modernist epic poetry of William Carlos Williams, into the myth-rending criticism of literary critics like Richard Slotkin. Perhaps most prevalent is the ghost of Howard Zinn: a hard, brave look at our nation set to a high-wire melody; the unthinkable somehow made observable; art as activism. The commerce of ideas that fueled the band had finally reached a grand and sweeping timbre. The songs became story, all twelve linking hands, a narrative formed amongst piano strokes, charting a nameless man's infernal march from the ?pomp and loft? of his privileged youth through his death on the American Frontier and, ultimately, beyond. The dreamy, quasi-historical landscape in which the songs exist at once treats the nations greatest historical sins ? slavery, Native American removal, nuclear war, and the ills of industrial capitalism ? and the transgressions of individuals. And in its climactic moments, Attic & Cellar swells with achievements both private and political, with scenes of communal solidarity and with acts of pure love and personal redemption.

The beauty of Alex's Southern Gothic language is matched note-for-note by Jacob's baroque orchestration ? entire string and woodwind quartets, avant-garde application of noise and space and electronics, influenced by mid-20th century modernists of both aural and visual art. Jacob's lofty Attic and Alex's rustic Cellar, ?made one again.? By the time the sessions for Attic & Cellar had reached their highest pitch, the two were working feverishly in two different cities, with an innate trust in one another that is nothing short of inspiring. Jacob drafted into service countless talents at NYU, recording whenever and whatever he had the chance to. Alex drove from his home in Massachusetts to that colonial at the bottom of Connecticut, singing not in a sterile booth but in a long and dusty hallway, at the head of the stairs, so one can literally hear the walls on Attic & Cellar, a voice between haws in the wood, and if you asked him, he would tell you that is the way we must hear it. We are hearing history after all ? for if history is a record of the mistakes we must never again make, who is to say what honest document is not? The dust blends with the sweat on the hands of four men, loosening and falling free from stories of victor and victim, pride and shame, penance and remembrance ? the tale told and the space between the sound.

We drove north along Interstate 93 and I heard the final song that Aeroplane, 1929 will release. I've spoken about deathbed speeches, about our strange but entirely human need to close the volume once we've registered the final words we need to hear. We welcome Death when it comes with stoicism and poetry. When the moment to move on arrives, we know it, instinctually. As the album closes, Alex Mazzaferro sings, ?Turn the page, it's okay? ? colloquial and elemental to the end, a last missive so touching that when the final note sounded Chelsey and I just left the stereo off, and drove on in the quiet, not the silence, the quiet.

Chad Jewett, June 2010
Cambridge, Massachusetts