I believe that's Schneider's voice talking excitedly as "Song Against Sex" opens, encouraging Mangum and describing his performance as "perfect," and Mangum has spoken repeatedly about how important his enthusiasm and belief was to the NMH project. The album was produced by Robert Schneider of Apples in Stereo, whose house-producer role in the E6 sphere you might compare to Conny Plank's in the German experimental rock underground. It's the kind of sentiment that teenagers who feel assaulted by their surroundings will continue to discover, and its wide-eyed and wounded view of the world goes a long way toward explaining why they keep returning to this songwriter.ĭespite its vague and decidedly lo-fi profile, Avery also has its share of experimentation, and it's well integrated into the songs themselves. And in "Song Against Sex", drugs and porn and staged representations of lust are so repellent that the narrator wants to leave the world altogether.
NMH's world is a place where sex is fumbling, a reliably imperfect expression of an emotion that dreamers want to see perfected. The opening "Song Against Sex" is one of them, a fuzz rocker with a hypnotically catchy and repetitive melody and lyrics that hint at the awkwardness and alienation that draws people toward Mangum's work.
#MY DREAM GIRL DONT EXIST HOW TO#
Certainly, Avery has a comparatively muffled sound and doesn't always seem to understand how to best showcase Mangum's gifts (his voice is often double-tracked and lower in the mix and hence less distinctive), but on a song-by-song basis it has almost as many great moments. And while it's a settled matter that Aereoplane is the high-water mark for the band (as well as being one of the best indie rock records of the last two decades), I can tell you that at the time there were plenty of people who felt that its predecessor, 1996's On Avery Island, was nearly its equal. I've met people who adore In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and didn't know that Neutral Milk Hotel had ever released anything else, so it's tempting to view everything Mangum released with an eye to the part it played in the Aeroplane story. Possibly serving as a sort of tribute to this moment, Mangum has released this limited vinyl-only box set, which collects almost all of the material released under the Neutral Milk Hotel name and adds 15 additional rare and unreleased tracks. Since Mangum's return to performing, first as part of the Elephant 6 reunion in 2008 and then with a slate of shows last year, Neutral Milk Hotel started to seem like something that existed in the present tense again. People were rediscovering this music, and the median age of the Neutral Milk Hotel obsessive has continued to hover in the early twenties. Instead, in place of a working band with a growing catalog, Neutral Milk Hotel became an absent band with a growing cult.
Yet unlike the followers of many bands from that time who moved on, his fans didn't trickle away. Jeff Mangum, the project's creative force, stopped releasing new music and quit playing shows.
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