Stuff @ Night
21 July 1998
"Neutral Milk Hotel's Rooms with a View" by Jonthan Perry
The last time Neutral Milk Hotel played the Middle East, they barely had room for their trombone. The band was performing upstairs and every square centimeter of floor place was sold, even though it had been a rotten March Sunday of drizzling rain and soggy streets. But that's how rapidly word had spread about NMH's strange and wonderful sophomore release, In the Aeroplane over the Sea, an album whose dark, damaged beauty seems to expand and deepen with every listen. In a live setting that night, the material become only more dramatic, the lyrics more imperative. And the spirit of the music - wild, poignant, unfettered - seemed worlds away from the soft-spoken manner of its creator, Jeff Mangum, a thoughtful 26-year-old who seems to measure his thoughts before committing them to speech.
"When people get excited about what we're doing, it's really overwhelming in a really beautiful sense," says Mangum of the groundswell of support NMH began receiving shortly after issuing their '96 debut, On Avery Island (Merge). "But even if there's three kids up front who are smiling and happy who really want to see and hear the band play, well, that's cool, too."
The Middle East is betting there will be substantially more than three kids who want to hear Neutral Milk Hotel when the group returns to Cambridge July 24. This time, though, the band has wisely been booked into the much larger downstairs room and will headline a bill that also includes the great local pop group Papas Fritas, as well as Of Montreal.
What was even more amazing than the sight of NMH's pile of equipment that rainy March night - a conglomeration of rusty old saws, beat-up washboards, and what looked to be an assortment of rummage-sale leftovers - is how consistently the group managed to wring beauty from chaos.
As one of several bands that constitute the Elephant 6 Recording Co., a musical collective made up of friends who write and perform music together in bands like the Olivia Tremor Control, Apples in Stereo, Elf Power, and Beulah, NMH is largely the product of Mangum's brazenly inventive imagination and the songwriter's cracked-looking-glass perceptions.
But this universe is realized through a collaborative camraderie that, at least to outside eyes, borders on the utopian. Elephant 6 members routinely pitch in on each other's band efforts, contributing a harmony vocal or fuzz bass here, a trombone or flugelhorn there. Yet each group's personality remains distinct from the others.
"The idea of a band is that everybody sort of morphs into the project at hand," says Mangum. "Even when the projects contain some of the same members, it's really important for each project to have an identity of its own and to be taken seriously. And everybody puts themselves into it to express that."
Julian Koster - who plays bowed banjo, accordion, and singing saw with NMH and fronts his own Elephant 6 outfit, the Music Tapes - calls what he and his friends do "postband music." It's a term he applies to Elephant 6's aim of shrugging off convention, disposing of old confining cliches about what a band is supposed to be.
"I find that when I play in each of these different bands, the things that I think up are so different from what I would make up in any other context or situation," Koster says. "This kind of arrangement gives you an opportunity to explore a different side of creating that you'd never have the opportunity to do if you were in a 'normal' band. I mean, if Jeff [Mangum] wanted to, he could decide to play drums for two years in one of the other bands - he's an amazing drummer - and that would be okay. We'd still reach our audience, and people would still listen."
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