NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL

It is obviously a predictable and enormously welcome quirk of music (or, indeed, any form of art) that a work neglected at the point of its creation can later be 'rediscovered' by a score of gratified late-comers. In fact, it is probably one of the most enjoyable and special aspects of rock music given it means there will always be artefacts below the surface just waiting to be picked out and cherished like they always should have been. 1998's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is one such example but it is also one of the most unique. Anyone who has read a previous review of it or, indeed, has actually heard it will not need to be told by me that it is a curious, mysterious and enchanting album. What, really, makes it so special is the fact that it is so utterly unimitable. Something like The Modern Lovers is a perfect forgotten classic but it has since become unquantifiably influential, imitated and mimicked by some of the most important bands that followed in its wake. I struggle to see how anyone could really claim to have ripped off this album. The recent repackaging is almost intriguingly minimalist, containing only a few gushing quotes from 'cool' indie names, including members of current darlings Franz Ferdinand and the Arcade Fire. Even though I suppose you could trace a faint line from Aeroplane to Funeral it is perhaps indicative that in ten years time someone picking up this edition of the album may well not even recognise the names of the bands on the back. The stark, almost belligerent, absence of information on the album (seriously, not even the song titles are on it) rather cleverly enhances the most extraordinary quality of it. It is amazing to think this came out in 1998 at a time when everything in the mainstream music scene was so sterile and prosaic. It is an over-used adjective but this album really, truly is timeless. I cannot think of any other album that is just so impossible to pin down to a time or a scene. As far as I am aware, Neutral Milk Hotel is really just one person, Jeff Mangum, which certainly accounts for the album's determinedly eccentric personality, if not the wonderfully eclectic mash of instruments and styles. Mangum's voice is perversely hideous but yet impossibly compelling. He is like the aural equivalent of the Elephant Man and you can't help but be captured by his naked, ugly sincerity. The acoustic guitar is mixed far too high, the electric is as ugly as his voice but more distorted, and he constantly seems to lose the rhythm as he plays but somehow the whole thing just hangs together perfectly. It helps, of course, that he is so willing to play with different styles, with the droning horn section seamlessly moving the set from Celtic folk to New Orleans jazz to Mariachi bursts whilst never betraying the perception that this is just another odd, lo-fi indie album. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the whole album, though, is the lyrics. In a way that is genuinely comparable to Bob Dylan in his prime, Mangum achieves the improbable success of producing some of the most affecting and emotional songs from some of the most impenetrable and surrealist verse imaginable. Who knows who or even what a "Two Headed Boy" is but you can't help but feel the sadness dripping from Mangum's wailing. He takes us from perfect happiness to unbearable sadness with the first two lines of the brutal yet enthralling "Holland, 1945" ('the only girl I ever loved was born with roses in her eyes/but then they buried her alive one day in 1945') and as we crawl to the confused climax of the closing "Two Headed Boy Part Two" we're left feeling sorry for a protagonist we never even knew and I swear down the unresolved tragedy evoked by the very last line - 'but don't hate her as she gets up to leave' - makes for one of the saddest denouements conceivable. The consistency of the album is not perfect, the last quarter dips in quality, and I have never shaken the sense that the eight minute epic "Oh Comely" is actually rather dreary, so that I feel safe not handing out top marks, but I still cannot recommend this album enough. You can question the ability of the artist as a musician, even the quality of some of the songs, but the whole set ends up becoming such an experience that not to have sat through it, through all its perverse ugliness and compelling beauty, is simply to have missed out.

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Email me at: jackfeeny@yahoo.co.uk