CMJ New Music Report
30 March 1998
"Neutral Milk Hotel: The Band in the Aeroplane over the Sea" by Mike Wolf
Author Andre Breton once described surrealism's goal as using art to raise the human experience to heights above those of everyday life. If he were alive today, Breton's favorite band would probably be Neutral Milk Hotel
The Athens, GA quartet combines singer/songwriter/guitarist Jeff Mangum's idiosyncratic lyrics with music that borrows liberally from psychedelic rock, folk, and even jazz to throw open the doors that separate the real world from one in which emotions - from love and happiness to anger and sadness - are expressed in radiantly poetic fashion. The band's second album, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (Merge), builds on the expansive, warm guitar fuzz of its debut, On Avery Island, placing greater emphasis on both Mangum's songwriting and unique vocal style as well as the band's ability to coax beautiful sounds from just about any instrument or object.
Mangum's dizzingly surreal wordplay is fueled by personal experiences, and despite its often absurdist nature, has clear meaning to him. "All the lyrics, in my mind, fit together like a little filmstrip," Mangum explains. "Things in my mind jump around a lot, from first person to third person, childhood to adulthood, friends' experiences to my own. Sometimes I've been accused of being puposely vague, but that's never been the point. The point is that I'm trying to express emotions into words as best as I possibly can, and the problem is that emotions don't have words attached to them really." This communication problem becomes clear in the song "Gardenhead," from Avery, where in the midst of trying very hard to explain one particular "little filmstrip," Mangum seems to stop mid-song to emphatically sing, "It gets hard to explain." As no two people have the exact same set of experiences in life, nobody will interpret one of Mangum's songs to mean the same thing that it does to him. But the disparity of meaning that comes through the translation doesn't bother him. "I want people to be able to get something out of [the songs], and it's always a really pleasant surprise for me when they do. When I hear these songs, a certain range of emotions, feelings, thoughts, and memories go through my head, and it makes sense to me. But if someone else has a different set of images and emotions that comes from a song, that's perfectly fine. I have a certain feeling of trust and faith in letting them get whatever they want out of it."
Both of NMH's albums work as singular pieces of music rather than a collection of songs. The songs flow from one to the next, often without any pause in between, and, in contrast to the band's generally manic, gleeful live shows, the albums contain more of the emotionally dark moments that Mangum describes in his soft-spoken, modest style as merely "heavy." A good example of this heaviness can be heard on Aeroplane's "Two-headed Boy," where Mangum strums rapidly on his acoustic guitar, delivering lines like, "Two headed boy, there's no reason to grieve / the world that you need is wrapped in gold silver sleeves / left beneath Christmas trees in the snow / and I will take you and leave you alone / watching spirals of white softly flow over your eyelids / and all you did will wait until the point when you let go." Mangum drags out his last note and his strumming slows almost to a halt, and with a tambourine tap the band launches into "The Fool," a somber funeral march that trumpeter Scott Spillane leads with his incredibly impressive playing. It's the sort of gear change that NMH makes intuitively, and could sum up what Neutral Milk Hotel are all about - that the experience of any strong emotion is essentially a positive one.
On stage, however, NMH explodes in a crazed flurry of activity, as if the wonder of exposing this fantastic, private world to an audience has driven the band into some kind of spiritual frenzy. Drummer Jeremy Barnes drives the songs forward with strong and agile playing, his arms regularly disappearing in a blur of motion, sometimes even "air" drumming silent beats and fills to himself when there are none in the song. Spillane clamly positions himself and his horn back behind the microphone, bleating out melodic lines that often serve as the main instrumental voice in a song. Julian Koster is either bent over his singing saw, teasing quivering tones from it that sound far more organic than a synthesizer would, or leaping about the stage as if gripped by the giddy excitement of what the band is creating. All the while, Mangum sings and plays with urgency, at times with such emotion that he's forced to whirl around in circles. Words barrel out of his mouth as if he had no control over them, and when he sings loudly, his voice - which carries so much melody and atmosphere itself that he is able to play a few songs each set unaccompanied by any other instrumentation - rises to sublime heights, as he opens his mouth enormously wide to release all the feeling a song holds. Mangum says this catharsis of feeling allows him to connect with the audience in a truly positive way. "To be able to feel like I'm sharing that experience, instead of having people just stand there and watch, is really important to me. I want people coming to shows to share that with me, because I think they can listen to the records alone, in a bit of a different light."
In Aeroplane's lyric sheet, Mangum makes another attempt at explaining the unexplainable: When he roars, "I love you Jesus Christ" on "The King of Carrot Flowers Pts. Two & Three," he switches internal voices in the middle of the printed lyrics and writes, "And since this seems to confuse people I'd like to simply say that I mean what I sing, although the theme of endless endless on this album is not based on any religion but more in the belief that all things seem to contain a white light within them that I see as eternal." Words to live by, no matter what you make of them.
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