Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel is one of rock’s great disappearing acts. Oh, he hasn’t disappeared completely; he has played shows since his landmark sophomore LP, 1998’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and the band even briefly reunited a little while back, but Neutral Milk Hotel has never released a third LP, and I call that a tragedy because In The Aeroplane Over the Sea is stone cold brilliant.
A “fuzz-folk” member of the Elephant 6 Recording Company along with such bands as Apples in Stereo, the Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power, and of Montreal, Neutral Milk Hotel became known for its crazoid instrumentation and Mangum’s excitable vocals and surreal and brilliant lyrics. The horn arrangements on the LP—provided thanks to non-member Robert Schneider and band horn guy Scott Spillane—are revolutionary, as is the work of Julian Koster, who played a variety of instruments including singing saw, bowed banjo, accordion, and “white noise.” Meanwhile Jeremy Barnes played drums while Mangum handled vocals, guitar, bass, organ, shortwave radio—and I could go on. Throw in a zanzithophone and Uilleann pipes and you’ve got yourself some weird sounds buzzing around. But what makes In The Aeroplane Over the Sea—which may or may not be a sort of concept album about Anne Frank—such a wonder is its beguiling melodies.
“How strange it is to be anything at all,” sings Mangum on the title cut, and those words capture perfectly the sense of mystery and wonder that seem to be his defining characteristics. The goddamned guy is a mystic, awed by the reckless logic of the sprawl of the stars in the sky and rendered ecstatic by the thought of aeroplanes over the sea. As for that title cut, it’s easily one of the most gorgeous and moving songs I’ve ever heard, all strummed guitars and weird sound effects, to say nothing of a wonder of a trombone solo. Meanwhile, Mangum sings lovingly, “What a curious life we have found here tonight/There is music that sounds from the street/There are lights in the clouds, Anna’s ghost all around/Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me/Soft and sweet/How the notes all bend and reach above the trees.”
Almost as lovely is “Holland, 1945,” which is all big fuzz guitar and moves at a frenetic clip. Meanwhile Mangum reincarnates Anne Frank (“The only girl I’ve ever loved/Was born with roses in her eyes/But then they buried her alive/One evening 1945/With just her sister at her side/And only weeks before the guns/All came and rained on everyone”) into a “little boy in Spain” who “played pianos filled with flames/On empty rings around the sun/All sing to say my dream has come.” Mangum, a sensitive soul who would later suffer a nervous breakdown, is relentless crestfallen, and at one point sings, “On empty rings around your heart/The world just screams and falls apart,” which, if you’re a human being who has kept your eyes open, rings like an indisputable truth.
“King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1” features some jaunty guitars, a horn, and grows ecstatic just in time to segue into “King of Carrot Flowers Pts. II & III,” which opens with Mangum singing, “I love you Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ I love you, yes I do” before the band comes crashing in, a horn solos, and Neutral Milk Hotel kicks it into overdrive, with roaring guitars while Mangum lets loose on the vocals. “Fool” opens with a brief vocal before transmuting into a slow and lugubrious horn workout. It’s somber yet appropriate, as are the stringed instruments that come in to add to the sorrow.
“Communist Daughter” features crickets, odd sound effects, and is slow but oh so lovely. An incandescent trumpet solo makes the song, which goes out in a haze of white noise. “Ghost” features one big fuzzy guitar riff over which Mangum sings, again of Frank, “And she was born in a bottle rocket, 1929/With wings that ringed around a socket right between her spine/All drenched in milk in holy water pouring from the sky/I know that she will live forever, she won’t ever die.” And here’s the thing about Mangum, and I may be wrong but I don’t think I am: he’s simply too sensitive a soul for this world. The horror, pain, and sorrow that make up the human condition are too much with him, as he sings later, “And one day in New York City, baby, a girl fell from the sky/From the top of a burning apartment building fourteen stories high/And when her spirit left her body, how it split the sun/I know that she will live forever, all goes on and on.” The message may be Buddhist or Hindu or Christian, but I’m not convinced he really takes much solace from those words, “All goes on an on.” The world is simply too terrible a place.
“[untitled] begins with a drone and combines a very cool guitar roar with all manner of oddball instruments, including those Uilleann pipes and that bowed banjo, and that’s all before the trombone comes in. Then a mass of voices joins in and it’s so beautiful, so soul expanding, that I can hardly believe it. As for “Two-Headed Boy,” he’s in a jar and tapping on the glass, and the lyrics on this one are surreal but Mangum’s vocals are inspired (if a bit off-kilter) and loud as he sings, “Catching signals that sound in the dark/Catching signals that sound in the dark.” And once again it’s Mangum’s compassion that comes through, compassion for this deformity that never had a chance to live, and touch, and feel. As for “Two-Headed Boy, Pt. 2,” it opens with space noise (the singing saw, I think) before Mangum comes in and, after much verbiage, gets to the heart of the matter: “And when we break we’ll wait for our miracle/God is a place where some holy spectacle lies/When we break we’ll wait for our miracle/God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life.” But in the meantime, he asks the two-headed boy not to hate his mother “when she gets up to leave.”
“Oh Comely” opens with an acoustic guitar and is a slow, blues-based bummer that is inexplicably lovely, thanks largely to Mangum’s emotion-laden vocals. He reaches for impossible heights and doesn’t care much if he reaches them—it’s the trying that counts. And once again Frank appears, in the lines, “And I know they buried her body with others/Her sister and mother and five-hundred families/And will she remember me fifty years later?/I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine/Know all your enemies/We know who our enemies are.” And they’re set in a lyric sheet that is pure surrealism, amongst such lines as, “Your father made fetuses with flesh licking ladies/While you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park/Thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadiums/The music and medicine you needed for comforting.” Throw in a wonderfully evocative trombone that comes and goes, and an instrument that I don’t even know what it is, and what you have is a song that is so moving I don’t think its 8-plus minutes is overkill.
What Neutral Milk did with In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was fashion a machine and fire it directly at our ears; it’s easily one of the most moving LPs I know, and Mangum’s silence since then is nothing less than a tragedy. Perhaps he said it all; his focus on poor doomed Anne Frank reminds me of what Marlowe says of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness: “He had summed up—he had judged.” And it was Mangum’s judgment that the world that devoured Frank was an abomination. But to quote Marlowe again, Mangum’s last LP was “an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!”
I could easily be 100 percent off-track when I say that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was Mangum’s “The horror! The horror!” He had stepped over the precipice, looked down, and as I said before, judged. And what does one do with such knowledge? Make music? Once one has looked into the heart of darkness, one realizes that life is, as Marlowe notes, “a mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.” I hope the man is happy. I also hope he has another In the Aeroplane Over the Sea in him. But he may just be too tender a soul for this world. In any event, I hope he one day meets his beloved, who died in Bergen-Belsen concentration most likely of typhus, in Heaven.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
