"Dumb name." That's what people say when you mention Neutral Milk Hotel. "Dumb name." That's it.
Its awkwardness is often commented on in print, but I've yet to see an interview where someone just asked the question; nothing short of amazing, since it's a time-honored staple of bad rock journalism. On second thought, maybe that's why no one has asked. So, I figured it's up to me to play the sap.
"Where'd you get the name?"
"I have no idea," says Jeff Mangum, NMH's main songwriter and frontman. "It's been around since I was a kid. I don't even remember where it started."
Someone should have asked sooner, because those are just the kinds of things Mangum sings about: subterranean dreams and half-remembered emotions, things that are always there even if you can't remember where they started. Even the group's music - which betrays an enthusiasm for acoustic instruments (the singing saw, the banjo, the accordion) and folk music in the truest sense - seems like something from a past that may or may not have existed. Neutral Milk Hotel, in short, is about remembering, even - or perhaps especially - when memory fails.
Mangum's first memories come from his hometown of Ruston, Louisiana, home to Louisiana Tech. For reasons no one seems to understand (Mangum doesn't know, so rock journalists hardly stand a chance), late-Eighties Ruston gave rise to what became known as the Elephant Six Collective, a group of friends - many of them faculty brats - who went on to form critically lauded art bands as the Olivia Tremor Control, Apples (in Stereo), Mangum's own Neutral Milk Hotel, and countless others.
"I just think we were able to create our own little world there," the shy but affable Mangum offers by way of explanation. "There wasn't a scene. There wasn't any reason to be cool."
Members of Elephant Six have since been scattered across the country, but many have settled in Athens, Georgia, homebase for the Olivia Tremor Control and, right now anyway, for NMH. Mangum, who has moved around from Seattle to New York to Denver (home to the Apples and NMH producer Robert Schneider), says he probably won't be there much longer.
Mangum grew up with home recording and in a string of self-described noise bands that played a local laundromat and redneck bars in nearby Monroe. NMH as we know it, however, came together with the 1996 debut record, On Avery Island, on Chapel Hill's Merge label, which is run by indie-saints Superchunk (who share this weekend's bill with NMH). The record was widely acclaimed, with Spin calling it one of the "10 Best Albums You Didn't Hear in '96."
The groups's follow-up, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, is sure to garner similar raves. A willfully earthly space odyssey, Aeroplane is a contradiction, headily contemplating sonic transcendence just as it binds itself to rustic instrumentation and deftly controlled eight-track fuzz. At the center is Mangum and his guitar, a lone folk singer surrounded by a psychedelic swirl of somber Weilian horns and sadly singing saws, caught up - completely - in an opera from the past.
As for the lyrics, they begin in Mangum's distinctly plaintive and distinctly Southern whine. "When you were young, you were the king of carrot flowers," he sings. From there, it's all a reverie, an unfolding mythical world of "pianos filled with flames on empty rings arond the sun" and "gold silver sleeves left beneath Christmas trees in the snow." Vivid images illustrate a meditation on lost youth (Mangum's and others', such as Anne Frank's, oblique references to whom pepper the lyrics), reincarnation, and the endless cycle of life and death.
Mangum pursues these meditations in earnest, like a seer straining to see through this life and beyond. Like the band's music itself, he approaches transcendence with thoroughly earthy methaphors. Most refreshing is his sincerity. In an age of irony, he actually interrupts the liner notes to explain that a reference to Jesus Christ is in no way sardonic.
"I don't think there's any room for any irony in anything that I'm singing about," he says. "I don't think there's any point in that."
And coupled with the seemingly timeless orchestrations, Mangum's irregularly phrased memorial rhapsodies are simply moving, a rare thing in pop music these days. Although he says his sense of spirituality is no longer limited to the Christianity with which he was raised, his lyrics are moving in an evangelical way that suddently makes growing up in a town like Ruston make sense, although he himself is not sure.
"[Where] we're from is a pretty freaky place. It's a very, very conservative place. And we sort of struggled to live there, I think," he says.
And then, instantly, his tone changes, turns into a memory, like the stuff of one of his songs.
"I mean, it was a beautiful place to grow up as children," he says. "It was just a very safe place, a very quiet place, and I think there is a certain romance that I still have for that place. There's just certain feelings that you get when you're there, just by the way the sun is hitting the trees, or the way the wind's blowing, or the way things smell. It makes you sort of feel that way. And it's good to remember, because it's such a part of you that you don't ever get to experience much anymore because you never go back."
Not entirely, anyway.