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":
Your father made fetuses with flesh-licking ladies
while you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park
thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadiums
the music and medicine you needed for comforting
so make all your fat fleshy fingers to moving
and pluck all your silly strings
and bend all your notes for me
soft silly music is meaningful, magical
the movements were beautiful
all in your ovaries
all of them milking with green fleshy flowers
while powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines
smelling of semen all under the garden
was all you were needing when you still believed in me.
Which begins to sound like a Mad Lib but isn't quite. Like a lot of Mangum's lyrics, it gives you the feeling he isn't sure where he's headed when he starts out and is just as surprised as you are when, at the end, he finds himself so far out in left field. As in "The King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. Three," where he's motoring along on a perfectly straight-ahead idea and then throws an impossible curve: "Up and over we go through the wave and undertow/I will float until I learn how to swim/Inside my mother in a garbage bin."
"The songs are still just little films that I see that have a certain amount of emotion attached to them," he acknowledges, "but to explain them would be really, really difficult." Still, he gives the impression that he's determined to make sense of himself. A little further along in "The King of Carrot Flowers," he illustrates just how difficult this can be: "I will shout until they know what I mean/I mean the marriage of a dead dog sing/And a synthetic flying machine."
