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Out of time >> Neutral Milk Hotel: Southern art freaks, idiosyncratic savants, or indie-rock's great pre-rock hope? by CHRIS YURKIW
And while it's tempting to explain the rise of Neutral Milk Hotel's Southern-fried art freakiness (yes, see Michael Stipe, or William Faulkner for that matter) as one of those classic cases of regional-rock uniqueness born of isolation, it seems less a question of space than of time. Yes, Neutral Milk Hotel and the leaders of brethren bands Olivia Tremor Control and Apples in Stereo--all part of an amorphous "college art slum" in Athens dubbed Elephant 6--shambled out of nowheresville in Ruston, Louisiana. But try to pin down the quartet's individual and collective peregrinations, before the band truly came together in multi-instrumentalist Julian Koster's grandmother's basement in Long Island, N.Y. a couple of years back, and you'll stick a lot of pins in the map. No, it's time. One glance at the graphics of NMH's second (but this line-up's first) album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, lets you know that the contents are going to take you way back--maybe 100 years back, maybe 50 in the backwoods. They're turn-of-the-century illustrations close to those adorning the Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Crapness: not moons with faces but a woman with a drum for a face, and on the back cover a marching band with stilts for legs. But where Billy Corgan seems to want to evoke some fantastical nursery-rhyme world that exaggerates his nostalgia for being a child in 1979, Mangum seems a true naïf--and the R.E.M./subconscious connection is not facile. "I don't consider myself to be a very educated person," Mangum told Puncture magazine, "'cause I've spent a lot of my life in dreams." How else to explain Mangum's jarring jump back to a primitive folk music fleshed out by the group's Salvation Army horns, accordions, banjos, uillean pipes, bugle, euphonium, "singing" saw and something called a zanzithophone--given that drugs, if you believe the band, don't enter into it. "I will shout until I know what I mean" Mangum sings almost too loudly toward the end of "The King of Carrot Flowers Pts. Two & Three," letting us know that while this all might be yet another take on psychedelia, it's not one that's unaware of itself. "I don't have an alarm or a clock," drummer Jeremy Barnes tells me upon my second attempt to phone him. "You're, like, my wake-up call. Which is good." Yeah, I guess it's good if you're keeping company--or keeping time--with Jeff Mangum, who also seems to have no sense of time. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a jarring gem of an album that's been received with both open arms and closed minds by critics. They're looking for a "naïve transcendentalist" like Mangum to get rock out of the leg-hold trap of irony and subsequent eating of itself, but they're wary of his particular brand of "innocent piety" (Rolling Stone). To get back at Barnes for making me play hotel clerk, I take delight in hearing his brain squish after I ask him to describe the music of Neutral Milk Hotel--the worst question you can ask a musician, especially an apprentice "naïve transcendentalist." He's forced to defer: "I did read this thing that a guy in Chicago wrote, and he said something like, 'You'll dance the whole show and only realize afterwards that you were dancing to songs about death.' It's pretty heavy."
Neutral Milk Hotel and Elf Power play
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There's an old R.E.M. song called "Life and How to Live It" that Michael Stipe based on a story he heard about some Southern hermit who'd divided his home into two separate halves. When the ol' man got tired of one side he'd go live in the other. Jeff Mangum--singer, songwriter and, er, visionary of the Athens, Georgia-based band Neutral Milk Hotel--makes me think of that character: he doesn't need drugs to break on through to the other side. He just builds it and walks over.