In the Entertainment section of this week's Earth Two News, the following rave adorns a half-page advertisement for the new recording by entertainment titans Neutral Milk Hotel. Rex Reed Clone #FXB9924 eloquently expresses the population's fascination with the band when, in his terse, imaginative style, he exclaims: "On Avery Island is a hit! Three thumbs up for this pop masterpiece! No one misses that Richard Marx guy anymore! On Avery Island is where the whole family will want to be this summer! Who'd want to hear, say, Pearl Jam's whiny, bitchy dino-retread pulp when he or she could soar to new heights of indie-obscurantist bliss with On Avery Island?!!! ***** (five stars)"
But if you spend most of your time on this Earth, and haven't heard of Neutral Milk Hotel, don't worry, you're not alone. NMH began as a folk-noise-improv band gigging at their local laundromat seven years ago, and since then have released several singles (which I've never seen either) and played only a smattering of gigs across the country, notably appearing at "The Real Woodstock Two," Olympia, WA's International Pop Underground Festival (the beginning of the end for loverock) a few years back. You may not have heard this group yet, but you will soon. Like Galaxie 500 or Sebadoh circa 1988/9, a secret this good can't be kept by few for too long.
"Okay, dispense with the hype for a second please, what kinda band is this?," I can hear you think (my hearing's exceptional). A Louisiana native who can't keep still, bopping from a small town in Louisiana to Denver to Athens, GA, to NYC, Jeff Mangum and whoever else he hooks up with are Neutral Milk Hotel. Home-recorded last summer in Denver, On Avery Island is half-looped, weird-joy, Nineties sensitive-boy pop that marks the apex of the bedroom analogue-recording sensibility. The songs often melt into ambient loops and melt into one another in a way that almost has me using the phrase "seamless deconstruction," but I already went to art school a decade ago. A carnival atmosphere pervades Avery. Some songs sound like fleshed-out, lo-fi versions of video game music, some recall the merry-go-round's pump-organ, some make you think of other cultures (particularly Balinese and Turkish) and their whirling party sounds, and there's even bits that hint at the soundtrack to the Smurfs cartoon.
There's fuzzed-out basses and guitars; stirring, off-key crooning that manages to be catchy despite itself; a smattering of horns, trombones, bells, and various gamelan instruments; air-pump-driven organs that pulsate throughout; and early Eighties Casiotone keyboards pushed heavily through the red on the four-track tape recorder. Most things are played by Mangum, with assistance from Denver musicians Robert and Hilarie of Apples In Stereo, Lisa Janssen from Secret Square, Rick Benjamin from various jazz groups, and the Pree Sisters, who made some plinky-plinky sounds at the end of the thing. The music is the nightmare Brian Wilson had while making Pet Sounds, the forever-lost songs Paul McCartney recorded with Ian Brady and Myron Henley: dark, psychedelic, auteur songcraft. It's riff-heavy but intricate, lopsided and catchy.
You can dance around the room in your underwear to this music, you can write an obtuse term paper about it (don't forget: you'll never make it on the street unless you know EVERYTHING about Adorno, Debord, Blanchot, and Guattari), you can woo that sweetie by including it in a mix tape. (Do girls like it? Undeniably. Though not explicitly feminist, the lyrics reveal an obsession with halos and a mild abhorrence of pornography that many end-of-the-century USA chicks definitely ought to be down with.)
On Avery Island is album-length but not too long (that's another peeve: too many damn bands think just 'cause a CD can hold 74 minutes of stuff, we have to hear that much from them, and those ubiquitous "hidden" tracks are a pain in the ass). On Avery Island is the sort of record they don't make anymore; if it had a gatefold and came out twenty-four years ago your dad would have seeded his pot with it. It doesn't hurt that there's an ongoing "vibe" to this record -- sort of a friendly freak show atmosphere, not unlike the Tom Waits song "In The Neighborhood," or Dogbowl's third LP, Flan. Avery is a concept record where the band fails to force the concept down your throat. At last.
The lyrics plumb some very interesting depths without being unable to return (can you say "Daniel Johnston," boys and girls?) from them. They might remind one of visionary, outsider art, what Dubuffet termed "art brut" and Messrs. Ricco and Maresca term "cold cash, baby." Asked about the lyrics, Jeff replies: "It's a little embarrassing because my father," who digs the noisy bits the best and likes the record overall, "is sending CDs to my aunts and uncles and I'm hoping they don't read the lyric sheet and get creeped." We all worry what will the family think, but Jeff's relatives ought to feel nothing but pride. The entire lyrics to "Someone is Waiting" are "Someone is waiting to swallow all the halos out of you / as your face blows through my window / sending pieces flying all around my room." The music is just as haunting.
The big hit, track one, "Song Against Sex," begins with some imagery that's dark but intuitive; real enough to be much more than Steve Albini/Trent Reznor/"but iz it importent part of zee industreeal kultur to stare at zee piktures of zee forenzic pathologies, no?" posturing: "The first one tore a picture of a dead and hanging man / who was kissing foreign fishes that flew right out from his hands / and when I put my arms around him / I felt the blushing blood run thru my cheeks." While the song also contains the image of "burning men hanging out on the hooks next to window displays," and while the song ends with the pathetic teenage-note "So I'll sleep out in the gutter / you can sleep here on the floor / 'cause with a match that's mean and some gasoline / you won't see me anymore," we're talking persona here, not unedited soul-transcriptions a la Syd Barrett or Jonathan Richman.
The lyrics are the chocolate syrup to stir into your neutral milk. I apologize for that last sentence. On Avery Island, as a tour of current and future indie-pop fixations, has little competition. Mangum will tour with a band in the spring and further feed his travel bug. Hopefully, he'll never lose his circus / hurdy-gurdy sing-song fascination, his ear for intricate melodizings, or the ability to write such compelling lyrics. Although this is the first Neutral Milk Hotel album, Mangum has been making music under the NMH moniker since 1989. I'd wait another seven years for a record this good. But I hope I won't have to.
Mike McGonigal writes about stuff for some magazines, works in a used bookshop in Oak Ridge, TN, proud birthplace of the Nuclear Age, is currently finishing up his novel Fanboy In Hell, Part One, is working on another issue of his magazine/CD, Chemical Imbalance and would like to stop eating so much junk food.