Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (2005)

Kim Cooper is a busy author based in Los Angeles with many different interests, publishing zines and blogs that run well afield of rock music. She's still obscure enough that she doesn't have her own Wikipedia article, but her 33-1/3 entry remains one of the bestselling in the whole series. I take that as mostly artifact of the cult following of the band, such as it is. Neutral Milk Hotel was mostly a product of one man, Jeff Mangum, who came up with two albums before moving on to mysterious other things. He's considered by many to be one of rock's great lost souls, like Syd Barrett or Arthur Lee. It's not entirely fair, but there are the facts: he's an eccentric, he made an amazing one-of-a-kind album, and then he has mostly disappeared since. Cooper is not particularly into the myth. Like most of the cult she is into the album. I am too. I will say that, for being one of the bestselling titles in the series, it gets kind of a shabby translation to e-book, with what looks like a quick and dirty OCR scan job. But maybe that's more of a jab at Amazon and its customers. It's legible enough. Cooper goes with a clipped, just-the-facts-ma'am approach, detailing the travels and interactions of the informal Elephant 6 consortium, of which all NMH members were more or less participants (along with Apples in Stereo, Beulah, Olivia Tremor Control, and others). The project was mostly based in Athens, Georgia, although Denver, Austin, and other towns were involved too. I like the continuum from the B-52s to R.E.M. and on. In fact, a graphic designer for R.E.M. was responsible for the Aeroplane cover. Long after the album and even this book came out I finally had my own infatuation period with the strange masterpiece. Nothing else is quite like it and it stands timeless of itself. Cooper gets into the history of Mangum and the band, has some insights on the nuts and bolts of recording and production (based on numerous interviews with nearly all the principals but Mangum), runs through the album track by track, and entertains the inevitable questions about Mangum and his semiretirement from music. I learned a lot of things I didn't know. Some I might have been exposed to before, such as the oblique focus on Anne Frank or Mangum's cryptic Southern Christian spirituality, which I wanted to respect but found a little more creepy. I hadn't actually noticed the yelping for Jesus that much before. But that's OK—really, as weird as it is, it only makes the album richer, deeper. If we're going to make comparisons of classic rock, I think Mangum is linked more closely to Jonathan Richman than Syd Barrett. Check out this album sometime if you haven't yet. You could be surprised. If the appreciation runs deep enough, and you have some questions, that's the time to turn to this useful little book.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)

I find myself of several minds on this decidedly strange set by singer/songwriter Jeff Mangum's Neutral Milk Hotel. On balance they fall on the positive side—which is just another way of saying I like it a lot, even though I see the various problems plain. There's a lot of adenoidal yelpin' and wailin' contained herein, more than I usually have the tolerance for and most of it dallying on the borders of the dread twee. Directly so, in fact, with "The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One" to open, followed immediately by "The King of Carrot Flowers Pts Two & Three." The various eccentricities of instrumentation—accordion, cornet, flugelhorn, bowed banjo, etc., etc.—are whimsical unto the death. It's folk music on its face, with forerunners Camper Van Beethoven and Beat Happening attempting to enclose it at either end of a spectrum. It's not afraid to swell the bottom and rock out awhile when it has a mind, most obviously on the imposing "Holland, 1945." I haven't tried much to puzzle out if the strange fragments of lyrics floating by add up to anything. They're weird and that's enough for me. There's the aforementioned king of carrot flowers, there's a two-headed boy, and, indeed, as promised, there's an aeroplane over the sea. These various nouns are combined with verbs and adjectives and the syntax all seems correct. Hell if I know what it's going on about, however. But Jeff Mangum, who wrote and sings most of these songs, seems to mean every syllable. That feeling is quite strong. And there are so many strange winning moments swirling about this, musically in the various mash-ups of sound achieved or when the cornet sounds impossibly, unbearably sweet in passages. Mangum is frequently at the head of calibrated yet powerfully moving performances; he flails at his acoustic guitar with precision and poise and lets the strange words uncork at the top of his lungs. It excites a kind of awe in such moments, so willfully dwelling in the place it has chosen, and respect too, the kind of feelings I also have for Frank Zappa or Todd Rundgren—brainy (maybe overly so), musical, restless, ruthlessly creative. Obviously everything has been poured into this—indeed, it is practically the last thing we have heard from Mangum and this band since. But what is it? Devastatingly original, we can start there for sure.