But there’s also a fabulously mythic quality native to the music, almost like a beguiling artifact from a lost civilization. The majority of indie rock fans who fell in love with them were doing so in a world where they no longer existed, which made them ripe for emotional projection. Neutral Milk Hotel called it quits the same year In The Aeroplane Over The Sea was released. Part of that is to do with their own material circumstances. The band, and its music, seems eternally displaced from time illusory, phantasmal, reluctantly revealing its secrets over thousands of spins. And yet, despite all of these irritating precepts, there is an undeniable magic to Neutral Milk Hotel.
Jeff Mangum sings in a nasally cowboy bleat - vocal chords increasingly red and raw the deeper we get into the run time. When broken down to its base ingredients, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea might sound pretentious, maudlin and sickeningly atonal. This is not a particularly flattering description. Old-timey string music is re-entering the mainstream, thanks to artists like Tyler Childers and Billy Strings Inside Bluegrass’s Surprising Surge in Popularity Her head has been replaced with either a drum, or a halved potato, depending on your own interpretation. The sleeve featured a reappropriated vintage postcard of a woman gesturing towards the ocean. Mangum, swollen by the tragedy after reading her diary, penned heavy, blistering lines about the cruelty of life and the derangement of unrequited love, while the band kicked up a Depression-era instrumentation milieu of hurdy-gurdys, singing saw, and zanzithophone. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea functions, at least in part, as a paean for Anne Frank the teenager who perished in a concentration camp in 1943. Neutral Milk Hotel earned some mild national praise for On Avery Island, but as the story goes for so many tales of rock and roll mythology, Jeff Mangum, the band’s lead singer and creative engine, started to fall down a wild rabbit hole during the recording of their sophomore effort. Bands like Of Montreal, The Apples in Stereo and The Olivia Tremor Control emerged from that primordial soup, and they perfected a fractured, haunted interpretation of the late-60s freakouts from The Zombies and The Beach Boys. Before that album made landfall in 1998, the band was a beloved - but corporeal - fixture of the booming Athens DIY scene, centered around an assortment of talented misfits, most of them in Athens, Georgia, who called themselves the Elephant Six Collective. The group has been dead for decades, and yet, we keep finding ways to stay haunted by their ghost.įor the uninitiated, the legend of Neutral Milk Hotel begins and ends with the aforementioned In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. All together, you’re looking at a $156 price tag. The core albums are repressed in tasteful gatefold parcels, Jittery Joe’s is pressed on a picture disc, and the box set is tinseled with that distinct World’s Fair psychedelia that has always lended Neutral Milk Hotel its offbeat aesthetic flavor. The miniature catalog is getting the white tablecloth treatment at Merge Records - Neutral Milk Hotel’s eternal home - who just issued a vinyl box set, called The Collected Works of Neutral Milk Hotel, containing everything the band recorded over the course of their curious run. A couple apocryphal EPs also dot the timeline, as well as a bizarre homespun live recording called Live At Jittery Joe’s and a whole catalog of loosies and demos that never made it past the studio.
There is 1996’s fuzzy and spare On Avery Island, and the vaudeville mysticism of 1998’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea - which, if you grew up loving indie rock, was probably one of the keystones of your addiction.
#WORLD FOR TWO BAND PROFESSIONAL#
Neutral Milk Hotel put out exactly two albums during their 10 years together as a professional band.
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