CMJ New Music Monthly
March 1998
Neutral Milk Hotel In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Matt Ashare
Neutral Milk Hotel is the brainchild of Jeff Mangum, a Louisiana-born aural auteur with a precocious sense of harmolodic discord, which he applies with an almost childlike curiosity to his lo-fi creations. He's also a bit of a visionary poet, which is what distinguishes NMH from the brainier and more self-conscious retro of fellow Elephant 6 groups the Apples in Stereo and Olivia Tremor Control. Mangum got by with a little help from his friends on NMH's 1996 debut, On Avery Island, which sounded like a young Bob Dylan taking a ride on the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. It was that good, and so is In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. Having built NMH into a full-time foursome, Mangum follows his restless muse back beyond the Sgt. Pepper '60s to the '40s and '50s, which is where he says the album is "set." There, against a surrealist backdrop of nervously strummed guitars, fuzzed-out bass, ominous organ drones, and the occasional trumpet solo, he encounters "The King of Carrot Flowers" having teenage sex in a broken home; the ghosts of the "Communist Daughter" born in 1929; and his own uneasy faith, shaken and stirred by fractured images of beauty mingled with tragedy. "Soft silly music is meaningful, magical," Mangum sings on "Oh Comely," and I can't think of a better way to describe the effect of this disc.
Return to the Press page.