ALBUM REVIEW: Pan American – Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane

Kranky

Released: 20.03.26

Pan American aka Mark Nelson’s tenth solo album is structured like a long flight, from one shore of the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco. The place of take-off is unknown. The names may be purely incidental anyway. The journey itself is a metaphorical, largely inner one. It begins in the midst of children’s voices, sweet and muffled, dissolving into slow guitar and piano soundscapes. There is distant, formless singing too, buried deep beneath the music, forever trying to emerge. The mood reminds me a bit of Boards of Canada’s ghostly electronica (especially in fragmented, collage tracks such as Entrance To The Afterlife). In places, it reminds me too of the darkly luminous compositions of Angelo Badalamenti.

Something is taking shape and falling apart again, living and dying – and yet there is no hint of morbidity here, only a tender acknowledgement that growth and decay belong together. The name of the album is taken from the early 1950s Hollywood ballad You Belong To Me (made popular, amongst many others, by Patsy Cline). Fly The Ocean In A Silver Plane is a graceful and restrained venture, a kind of ‘romance without words’ – and though words never explicitly come to the surface, their presence endlessly reverberates throughout the album. The closing track, sung in an ethereal voice reminiscent of that of Julee Cruise, is especially haunting – as the album ends, I find myself landing in the past.