Neutral Milk Hotel
Byrnzie
Posts: 21,037
Anyone else here like this band?
I only discovered them recently thanks to Amazon.com recommending them to me based on my views & purchases.
I think they're superb. don't know how I missed them during the course of the past 20 years.
Neutral Milk Hotel - King of Carrot Flowers Parts 1-3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4avoEbGjYu0
Neutral Milk Hotel - Holland, 1945
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCjpbjCH5L0
Neutral Milk Hotel - Oh Comely
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iipO9Tvk1EI
Apparently the singer Jeff Mangum had a real obsession with Anne Frank, and suffered a nervous breakdown after this band released just two albums.
I don't know much else about them.
I only discovered them recently thanks to Amazon.com recommending them to me based on my views & purchases.
I think they're superb. don't know how I missed them during the course of the past 20 years.
Neutral Milk Hotel - King of Carrot Flowers Parts 1-3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4avoEbGjYu0
Neutral Milk Hotel - Holland, 1945
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCjpbjCH5L0
Neutral Milk Hotel - Oh Comely
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iipO9Tvk1EI
Apparently the singer Jeff Mangum had a real obsession with Anne Frank, and suffered a nervous breakdown after this band released just two albums.
I don't know much else about them.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
If you like their stuff there was a great article on Pitchfork in their top albums of the 90s countdown and another related ITAOTS article that is a good read. It says a lot about the Anne Frank connection and the band history. This is not it but this is also a good read:
http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/ ... r-the-sea/
and this too:
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/575 ... r-the-sea/
And there are a lot of other good bands on the Elephant 6 label. Jeff Mangum played on a few Apples In Stereo tunes. Their 'New Magentic Wonder' album is absolutely in my top ten favourite records of the last ten years.
Cool. Cheers!
Here they are:
http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lis ... -1990s/10/
004: Neutral Milk Hotel
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
There are very few albums that resist categorization quite so effortlessly as In the Aeroplane Over the Sea . For forty staggering minutes, Jeff Mangum short-circuits all conventional modes of expression, forging a private language that is endlessly intriguing and haunting in the truest sense of the word. Mangum sings as if possessed, painfully conveying fractured and moving tales with the imagistic skill of a brilliant novelist. He gnashes his teeth at the fabric of time, then wraps himself in it like a blanket, channeling the violence of his personal past through a claustrophobic frustration with his dejected present. His band, whose contributions to Aeroplane remain criminally underappreciated, elevate Mangum's songs from chilling sketches into vibrant opuses, fully realizing the antique otherworldliness of Mangum's storytelling.
Opening with the achingly gorgeous nostalgia of "The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1", Aeroplane immediately plays upon a potent conflation of cultural and personal past. The world of Aeroplane is haunted by Anne Frank-- the specter of childhood's unimpeachable innocence amidst the unfathomable horror of the holocaust. In the feverish "Oh Comely", Mangum longs to save her in "some sort of time machine." By "Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2", the album's indelible and heartbreaking closing track, he seems to have resigned himself to loving a ghost, singing with a thoroughly unnerving blend of heartbreak and exhaustion: "In my dreams you're alive, and you're crying/ As your mouth moves in mine, soft and sweet." The way people have been affected by Aeroplane is ample proof of its power and uniqueness. Like all classic art, it is widely misunderstood; yet to some, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has become a riddle the likes of The Wasteland -- an impossibly rich text that begs to be deciphered, yet continually evades any singular interpretation. --Matt LeMay
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/575 ... r-the-sea/
So, then, seven years later Domino reissues In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the arguments can begin anew. I've talked about this album with a lot of people, including Pitchfork readers and music writers, and while it is loved in the indie world like few others, a small but still significant number despise it. Aeroplane doesn't have the near-consensus of top-shelf 90s rock artifacts like, say, Loveless, OK Computer, or Slanted and Enchanted. These records are varied, of course, different in many ways. But in one key respect Aeroplane stands apart: This album is not cool.
Shortly after the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Puncture magazine had a cover story on Neutral Milk Hotel. In it Mangum told of the influence on the record of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. He explained that shortly after releasing On Avery Island he read the book for the first time, and found himself completely overwhelmed with sadness and grief. Back in 1998 this admission made my jaw drop. What the hell? A guy in a rock band saying he was emotionally devastated by a book everyone else in America read for a middle-school assignment? I felt embarrassed for him at first, but then, the more I thought about it and the more I heard the record, I was awed. Mangum's honesty on this point, translated directly to his music, turned out to be a source of great power.
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a personal album but not in the way you expect. It's not biography. It's a record of images, associations, and threads; no single word describes it so well as the beautiful and overused "kaleidoscope." It has the cracked logic of a dream, beginning with "King of Carrot Flowers Part 1". The easiest song on the record to like on first listen, it quietly introduces the listener to the album's world, Mangum singing in a muted voice closer to where he left off with the more restrained On Avery Island (through most of Aeroplane he sounds like he's running out of time and struggling to get everything said). The first four words are so important: "When you were young..." Like every perceptive artist trafficking in memory, Mangum knows dark surrealism to be the language of childhood. At a certain age the leap from kitchen utensils jammed into dad's shoulder to feet encircled by holy rattlesnakes is nothing. A cock of the head; a squint, maybe.
Inside this dream it all begins in the body. Moments of trauma, joy, shame-- here they're all experienced first as physical sensation. A flash of awkward intimacy is recalled as "how I remember you/ how I would push my fingers through your mouth/ to make those muscles move." Sometimes I hear this line and chuckle. I think of Steve Martin in The Jerk, licking Bernadette Peters' entire face as a sign of affection. Mangum here reflects the age when biological drives outpace the knowledge of what to do with them, a time you're seeing sex in everything ("semen stains the mountaintops") or that sex can be awkward and unintentionally painful ("fingers in the notches of your spine" is not what one usually hopes for in the dark). Obsessed as it is with the textures of the flesh and the physical self as an emotional antenna, listening to Aeroplane sometimes seems to involve more than just your ears.
Then there's the record's disorienting relationship to time. The instrumentation seems plucked randomly from different years in the 20th century: singing saws, Salvation Army horn arrangements, banjo, accordion, pipes. Lyrical references to technology are hard to fix. Anne Frank's lifespan from 1929 to 1945 is perhaps the record's historical center, but the perspective jumps back and forth over centuries, with images and figures sucked from their own age and squirted out somewhere else. When "The King of Carrot Flowers Part 3" mentions "a synthetic flying machine" our minds leap to something like Leonardo da Vinci's 15th Century drawings of his helicopter prototype. The image in "Two-Headed Boy" of a mutant child trapped in a jar of formaldehyde is pulled from Dr. Moreau's industrial age island. The radio play powered by pre-electric pulleys and weights, the nuclear holocaust in the title track. What's it all about? Mangum offers an explanation for these jarring leaps in a line about Anne Frank in "Oh Comely," where he sings, "I know they buried her body with others/ her sister and mother and 500 families/ and will she remember me 50 years later/ I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine." If you can move through time, see, nothing ever really dies.
Seven years it's been, and whether Mangum has had personal trouble or somehow lost his way with music, it's not unreasonable to think that we've heard the last from Neutral Milk Hotel. I hope he does, but he may never pick up the guitar he set down after "Two-Headed Boy Part Two." Even so, we have this album and another very good one, and that to me is serious riches. Amazing to think how it started, how at the core of it all was guts. I keep thinking of "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding," and one of Dylan's truest lines: "If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine." Aeroplane is what happens when you have that knowledge and still take the risk.
— Mark Richardson, September 26, 2005
I actually ordered a copy a few days ago...inspired by this record.
I did come across this though; looks interesting and has some good reviews.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... blegumbook
Here's a decent auld cover of Two Headed Boy by Glen Hansard & Swell Season. The boy can do no wrong
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_5mHt8BZro
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH3CRVVBL9o
Love that album and band and love their other album
Charlotte 03
Asheville 04
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Seattle 18
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You mean 'die', not 'day'.
http://flagpole.com/blogs/homedrone/posts/neutral-milk-hotel-to-play-two-full-band-shows-at-the-40-watt
http://walkingwallofwords.com/tour.html
Hoping to catch at least one of the Philly shows and one of the shows with Half Japanese opening.
OCTOBER 25, 2013
Neutral Milk Hotel w/ Half Japanese, and Daniel Johnston
Asheville, NC
Mountain Oasis Festival
Thomas Wolfe Auditorium
That Mountain Oasis Festival has some other very appealing bands playing. Could be an epic week. Dont think the boss would appreciate all the vacation time Im requesting, hmmmm...
You guys also might like Mikal Cronin. Check him out if you haven't already.
Regal Theater, 1994--most amazing night ever.
~not a dude~
2010: MSGx2
2012: Made In America
2013: Pittsburgh, Brooklynx2, Hartford, Baltimore
2014: Leeds, Milton Keynes, Detroit
2015: Global Citizen Festival
2016: Phillyx2, MSGx2, Fenwayx2
2018: Barcelona, Wrigleyx2
Yeah! It took like an hour just for the page to load to buy the tickets
Didnt get the tickets I wanted through web sale. Stupid webpage problems/work. I will be at the Union Transfer show, just need to work a little of my magic to get tickets.
Glad to see all the love here from PJ fans!
NYC 5/21/10; Buffalo 10/12/13; Baltimore 10/27/13
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a superb album.
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2014 Berlijn
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Typo Man: "Thanks kidz, but remembir, stay in skool!"
2003 ~ Toronto
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