The Phoenix Network:
 
 
About  |  Advertise
 
Big Hurt  |  CD Reviews  |  Classical  |  Jazz  |  Live Reviews  |  Music Features

Mangum's opus

Neutral Milk Hotel's epic Aeroplane
By CARLY CARIOLI  |  March 7, 2008

080308_aeroplane_main

This article originally appeared in the March 5, 1998 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

If it's difficult to sum up the exquisite sonic splendor of Neutral Milk Hotel's second album, In the Aeroplane over the Sea (Merge), it's even more difficult to convey this CD's fascinating, elliptical spiritualism. Shaded with cryptic allegory, illuminated by a patchwork faith that embraces Jesus Christ, angels, flying Victrolas, and reincarnation as just a few of its icons and tenets, it dwells in a twilight of rambunctious souls, secret songs, and bright, bubbly, terrible scenes. And it heralds the arrival of a formidable new voice in popular music.

That voice belongs to the band's 26-year-old singer, songwriter, and only permanent member: Jeff Mangum. He grew up in a deeply religious family in rural Louisiana, though he makes it clear, over the phone from Athens, Georgia, that "I wasn't brought up, like, Southern Baptist burn-in-Hell. I was brought up, like, weird sorta psychedelic Christianity." And he wrote most of the first Neutral Milk Hotel album, On Avery Island (Merge, 1995), with an acoustic guitar and a mere handful of chords while living in the closets and on the floors of friends, composing for these friends wild, hymnlike, heart-wrenching songs to soothe their troubles. The songs of In the Aeroplane, like those of On Avery Island, get fleshed out until they buzz like a cross between a folkie in the midst of a caffeine-overdose seizure (Neutral Milk Hotel have been known to call it "fuzz folk," though if they weren't playing acoustic guitars it would almost certainly sound like punk) and a tripped-out high-school marching band outfitted with a thrift shop's worth of obscure instruments from accordion to zanzithophone. Yet on the album's centerpieces, the boundless seven-minute epic "Oh, Comely" and "Two-Headed Boy," Mangum virtually redefines the emotional possibilities for one man and an acoustic.

Mangum can be pretty opaque when he wants. His trademark is an unrelenting lyricism -- long, dazzling arcs of gilded melodies and run-on sentences that keep unfolding in alliterative twists and jackknife turns, sometimes so free-associative, they sound as if they had been created out of thin air as a spontaneous dada-ist soliloquy. He spins tales the way Jimi Hendrix played guitar -- burning words and phrases rolling out in a strange technicolor beauty that keeps blooming long after the images he's describing have ceased to make any rational sense. In the Aeroplane opens with the following: "When you were young you were the king of carrot flowers/And how you built a tower tumbling through the trees/In holy rattlesnakes that fell all around your knees." Bizarre, surreal -- but vivid.

Even Mangum's most patently nonsensical musings have an amusing, playfully poetic ring. He once wrote an item to publicize an appearance by New Zealand singer/songwriter Chris Knox that concluded: "What makes great art? Music? Is it tied to shame or sex, or both -- or broth? It is none of these things but only in being born we walk in the womb forever battling egg-shaped saucers." This is Mad Lib for the ages, the kind of flirtation with nonsense that has engendered more than a few comparisons between Mangum and the king of such dalliances, Bob Dylan. More typical, though, is the kind of boundless verbiage like the following, from "Oh, Comely":

1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |   next >
Related: Video: Our 10 most popular videos from 2009, Various Artists | Songs For Chris Knox, Eat it, High School Musical!, More more >
  Topics: Music Features , Entertainment, Music, Music Reviews,  More more >
| More

 Friends' Activity   Popular   Most Viewed 
[ 03/20 ]   "Brew and Chew with Will Gilson & Peak Organic"  @ Boston Center for Adult Education
[ 03/20 ]   "Brew and Chew with Will Gilson & Peak Organic"  @ Boston Center for Adult Education
ARTICLES BY CARLY CARIOLI
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   YODA IS IN THE BUILDING  |  March 07, 2012
    First, the numbers: the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference grew 50 percent from 2011 to 2012, and has now grown 1300 percent from its inception, in 2007, as a roomful of MIT math nerds, to last weekend's 2200-strong blowout at the Hynes Convention Center.
  •   NEWTON'S NEW ART CENTER EXPOSES HEAVY METAL FROM WITHIN  |  August 24, 2011
    Named for a Candlemass song, staged in a former church, and curated by a pair of noise-loving MassArt grads, the upcoming group show "We Still See the Black" brings a thunderous charge of wrathful, subtle, beguiling, and teeming contemporary art to Newton's New Art Center beginning September 15.  
  •   DOING IT NINJA STYLE  |  April 22, 2011
    Take three notorious singer-songwriters and one famous author. Give them eight hours to write and record an eight-song album. Broadcast the session on the internet. Release the album online the next morning, and perform it live in front of an audience the following night.
  •   WAX MUSEUM  |  April 20, 2011
    If you don't cringe, at least a little bit and maybe a lot, when you see Sean Duffy's Burn Out Sun (2003) — a sculptural starburst of crisscrossing LPs bearing the immortal Sun Records label — then you probably aren't much of a record fan.
  •   NET NEUTRALITY HAS BECOME THE BIGGEST FREE SPEECH ISSUE OF THE 21ST CENTURY. IS IT DOOMED TO FAILURE?  |  April 11, 2011
    One morning last month, Senator Al Franken stood at the podium of a hotel in downtown Austin, looking out at some of the most innovative minds in the country gathered at this year's South by Southwest Interactive conference. "I know that many of you have heard people talk about net neutrality before," he said, "but I want to take just a moment to explain it, because part of the strategy being used to destroy net neutrality is to confuse Americans about what the term even means."

 See all articles by: CARLY CARIOLI

MOST POPULAR
RSS Feed of for the most popular articles
 Most Viewed   Most Emailed