any have said that 2003 will be remembered as the year “indie kids learned how to dance.” The year the Rapture, !!!, et al brought us to our feet and made us “shake it like a Polaroid picture.” But for me, sadly, 2003 was none of this. I did manage to see Out Hud and !!! twice each, but these were hardly the moments that defined my year.

2003 was the year I discovered Xiu Xiu. It was the year I fell for Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It was the year I entered therapy and confronted a multitude of issues that I had ignored for the first few years of my adolescence. It was the year I entered my first serious relationship and, nine months later, the year I left it.

No wonder, then, that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea climbed into my Top 20 Albums of All-Time. Back in March, my parents were reviving their repressed animosity in forms terrifying to a sixteen year-old with a calamitous fear of conflict. I sent my girlfriend an e-mail with the lyrics to “King of Carrot Flowers, Part One”:

and your mom would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulder
and dad would throw the garbage all across the floor
as we would lay and learn what each others bodies were for

and this is the room one afternoon i knew i could love you
and from above you how i sank into your soul
into that secret place where no one dares to go
and your mom would sink until she was no longer speaking
and dad would dream of all the different ways to die
each one a little more than he could dare to try

These, I explained, were some of the bravest lyrics ever written. Accompanied by a warm acoustic guitar and achingly beautiful keyboards, delivered by, dare I say it, the most poignant vocalist of the nineties, they surpassed any existing paragon of beauty. If language is a barrier that obfuscates emotion, then with “King of Carrot Flowers,” Mangum discovered how to knock over every barrier in sight.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea became the album my girlfriend and I shared as we each learned to cast our problems aside and immerse ourselves in one another, as “King of Carrot Flowers”’ two characters do. It was one of the few albums we shared an equal love for; “our album”, I suppose.

After only a few months with my girlfriend, though, I was starting to have serious second doubts about the relationship. Very depressing second thoughts, ones that, in conjunction with those caused by my parents’ fights, kept Jamie Stewart’s remarkably (in)human wails in continual flow out of my speakers. It was the noise of “Apistat Commander” that really did it for me. That explosion, which packed more emotion per unit of volume (of which it had many) than anything I had heard before, just killed me. Most of all, it was the moribund chorus:

all that you left
you left for someone
all of this hurt that’s wilted off
oh this relief, it’s the oddest thing
oh my God, oh my God, oh my God

As beautiful as these two bands’ music is, though, I will feel little nostalgia for 2003. It’s been a couple days since I broke up with my girlfriend, and I’m hoping to put Xiu Xiu and NMH on the back-burner for a while. 2004 will be the year I dance. The new !!! and Out Hud albums will keep me moving my feet; maybe I’ll even give Echoes another chance (I’m not much a fan at the moment). Better late than never.