In the densely populated world of rock music, great things can happen when pop perfectionism is mixed with a restless sense of experimentation. That's how seminal albums like the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds come about. It's also at the heart of one of the most interesting rock collectives to emerge this decade: Elephant 6, a group of Louisiana-bred bands that includes Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel, both of which performed at Brownies on Monday night.
In concert, the two motley bands were clearly the products of small towns, where the intersection of a misfit teen-ager and a few obscure records bought on a whim can result in idiosyncratic, ground-breaking music. The bands, which seemed as though they had just emerged from a home studio where they had been locked up for years, didn't necessarily make music to please the crowd at Brownies: audience members were privileged voyeurs. The stage for Olivia Tremor Control's set even lookd like a messy bedroom studio, cluttered with wires, mixers, a four-track recorder and dozens of instruments, from a zylophone with half its keys missing to a beat-up Tibetan prayer board.
Neutral Milk Hotel, which opened the show, consisted of four musicians who in some songs played as many as eight instruments. The arrangements were eccentric - sparser songs consisted of just an acoustic guitar accompanied by a musical saw, a melodica, a French horn, or a banjo played with a violin bow - but the melodies glided by like classic British Invasion pop. Jeff Mangum's lyrics, which he bawled as much as sang, ricocheted between surreal images, stream-of-conscious psycho-analysis and deep reflection. After a breathless verse about life, death, roller-coasters and prevarication in one of his best songs, "Gardenhead," he sang, "It gets hard to explain," as if words could not communicate what was occuring in his mind.
Similarly, genres could not really characterize the music played Monday night. Psychedelia seemed as much of an influence on the melodic canterwaul of Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor Control as the free jazz of Albert Ayler, the progressive rock of Soft Machine and the electro-acoustic music of Iannis Xenakis. During its set, Olivia Tremor Control flucuated between shimmering pop with three-part vocal harmonies to noisy jams during which the band's members all switched instruments with one another.
When joined by members of Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control had eight musicians onstage. At one point there were five people singing simultaneously, one person playing a tuba with its bell pressed against the wall and another crouching on the floor humming into his Moog synthesizer. Sometimes the collective seemed like the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the conceptual 1970s orchestra whose musicians used instruments they could barely play. But most of the time it seemed like a dedicated pop-music explorer. The band sometimes even surprised itself, with members commenting to one another, "Listen to that great chord," or "What was that swarming sound?" after a particularly exhilarating song.