Indie rock got no reason to live, right? Its time-honored specialties aren't so special anymore. Irony stinks up everything on TV; the latest in antisocial noise comes out of a beat machine, not a guitar.
Then again, those are just tools, easily discarded. As the name suggests, indie rock's real specialty is difference, and the search for that continues. Arty experiment has been one route; bent melody another. Neutral Milk Hotel, keeping the experiments loose and the melodies radiantly idiosyncratic, have gone both ways.
They represent a fresh injection of the genre's roots - the next wave of misfits. Along with Olivia Tremor Control and Apples in Stereo, NMH are part of the Elephant 6 collective, a group of friends who grew up in the boondock outpost of Ruston, in Louisiana. Without many cultural outlets, it's the kind of place where bohemianism is not a role to try on, but a way to survive. Art-minded types have no choice but to band together and play for each other. In Neutral Milk Hotel, that small town insularity has produced uncannily fresh music: folk-pop rooted in, rather than deconstructed by, a backwoods musical circus.
Their 1995 debut, On Avery Island, featured singer/songwriter Jeff Mangum spouting stream-of-consciousness lyrics and moaning melodies as pretty as Brian Wilson's. Trombones, xylophones, air organs, and various exotic or cheesy instruments (many played by Mangum himself) blurted woozy acid-march music around his voice. Far-flung as these elements sound, they were channeled by producer Robert Schneider (of Apples in Stereo) into a fuzz-heavy, delicately tuneful song cycle.
With In the Aeroplane over the Sea, some of the fuzz has been cleared, leaving room for Mangum to fly solo more often with his speed-freak acoustic surrealism. Other songs retain the first record's bizarre style of accompaniment, even finding space for euphonium, zanzithophone, musical saw, and "one-note piano" - so the credits say. The band - Schneider again producing - march, honk, and trill. They go down-home here and punk out there. They conjure a spacey textural hum to counter the singer's naked emotion.
But NMH is still Mangum's vehicle, and he's made this record a starker, more urgent affair. In many spots he dispenses with hooks, letting songs follow the shifting outlines of his own intensely expressive vocal style. He breaks from indie tune-making, offering instead an instinctive and madly personal musical vision, where "outsider" pop (Wilson, Syd Barrett, Daniel Johnston, etc.) is wedded to what sounds like an archaic social music. Voiced in lyrics that venture from spiritual yearning to raw sexuality and World War II, the recording that emerges seems to stand oddly apart from its time.
It begins ambitiously, with 3-part medley "The King of Carrot Flowers." A quick acoustic strum figure is filled out with gently rolling accordion. Mangum, his voice flat and double-tracked, sings long melodic lines to fit the words tumbling out of his mouth. The lyrics fall into a recurring NMH theme: innocence seeking refuge. "Mom would stick a fork right into Daddy's shoulder . . . As we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for."
The kids lying together in secret have courage: "From above you how I sank into your soul / Into that place where no one dares to go." The parents don't: "Dad would dream of all the different ways to die / Each one a little more than he could dare to try."
There is a sense that the young will become the old, the dream will meet hard reality. But the rapturous physical descriptions of youth overwhelm all other perspectives. Mangum, who is 27, can't speak about youth from any distance; but he doesn't sound naive. Rushing headlong, he's determined to make a fleeting moment into an eternal one; to make "reality" sound surreal and a young person's dream the only way to live.
Headlong rush and willful belief have largely defined Neutral Milk Hotel thus far. Their first record flew on lines like, "We ride roller coasters into the ocean / We feel no emotion as we spiral down into the world." It shocked with a lack of irony: "Kids in their cars / Cigarettes smoking / All that they are just reeks with the sweetest belief." On Aeroplane, Mangum slides that belief in a spiritual direction: "I love you Jesus Christ," he declares in a high whine in "Carrot Flowers, Part II." It seems less a religious conversion than a natural extension of his worldly embrace.
And then, two lines on, Mangum utters this affirmation: "I will float until I learn how to swim / Inside my mother in a garbage bin." The underlying abortion allusion here is characteristic of the graphic physical description in these songs.
Bodies come together awkwardly: hands go in mouths, tongues get torn out. Everything stinks: dresses, skin, perfume, sweat. Images are physical: "I don't wish to taste of your insides"; "The movements were beautiful / All in your ovaries." Beauty is found - even smokers "reek with the sweetest belief." But discomfort lingers.
The power of the descriptions resides in their mix of awe and disgust. This ambivalence, along with the visceral detail, supplies Mangum's love songs with the ring of experience, of truth discovered. In place of insight, he gives us a firsthand look at the process of finding it. Sensory impressions of sex, bodies, and the world outside tangle and overwhelm. The singer records them, and makes the first tentative steps toward sorting them out.
As Aeroplane continues, though, his steps get bigger. The record darkens. Songs circle vaguely around World War II: "Holland 1945" is about Anne Frank. Then Mangum cuts it all down to his voice and acoustic guitar on "Oh, Comely" and the two-part "Two-Headed Boy." His voice is given free rein; prettiness is sacrificed to intensity.
The first part of "Two-Headed Boy" is where this intensity peaks. The song is like a fever dream, with structure scrapped for free-form vocal improv. It's not a narrative, but a sustained moment of high, mysterious passion. It is vaguely about a "two-headed boy" listening to his radio. But as Mangum swoops, holds notes, and pushes his voice until it cracks, he makes the story a springboard for his real subject: communication at its most desperate.
"Two-Headed Boy" begins in loneliness: "I am listening to hear where you are," he sings, so loud it jumps out of the song and talks to you. The song peaks, typically, as desperation is made physical. He sings a line about the boy's radio "catching signals in the dark." Needing, suddenly, to break through that image of distance and loneliness, he free-associates, connecting the line with, "In the dark we will take off our clothes." When he rolls downward on these words, the song's context shatters, and we are left with the startling, mysterious drama of the act itself.
In a sense, "Two-Headed Boy" and the other solo acoustic songs here take the uncomfortable intensity of people like Johnston, Barrett, and Roky Erickson and bring it to the sane world. This isn't to say Mangum has really been influenced by them; but the indie cults formed around those performers have made their collective style (pop structure loosened to accommodate tottering emotion; lyrics of willful innocence) into an aesthetic, a postpunk tool for expressing raw emotion.
Where those performers are tentative observers of the world, Mangum is an impassioned if somewhat dreamy participant. With his new bare-bones, freestyle approach, he's able to build his mountain of images, and give it a sense of urgency. The images aren't sorted into a perspective; they become an analogous language, a surreal composition of words. Lines like "Your father made fetuses with flesh-licking ladies" and "God is a place where you will wait for the rest of your life" say nothing specific. But when the singer twists them in his hard-edged wail, they become the sound of emotion testing its own limits, of spiritual innocence struggling to contain horrible reality.
Mangum doesn't bother to resolve this struggle. He dives into it, and comes back with thrilling, unflinchingly romantic music.