If you were around when Neutral Milk Hotel were a working band, it would have been difficult to predict the stature they'd later acquire in the independent rock sphere. That they were great, and special, was clear to a lot of people following indie rock, but they didn't necessarily seem like the kind of group that would develop into something amounting to a "legend." For one thing, they were visible during the mid and late 1990s, doing exactly the same kinds of things other indie rock bands were doing. They were on Merge, putting out albums, EPs, and singles, touring the same venues as young bands like Modest Mouse and Helium. They weren't under-appreciated and were by no means obscure; and the fact that they were part of a "scene" that made for such great copy-- the Elephant 6 Recording Company-- meant they got their share of attention in the indie music press.
But then they went away. Jeff Mangum, the project's creative force, stopped releasing new music and quit playing shows. Yet unlike the followers of many bands from that time who moved on, his fans didn't trickle away. Instead, in place of a working band with a growing catalog, Neutral Milk Hotel became an absent band with a growing cult. People were rediscovering this music, and the median age of the Neutral Milk Hotel obsessive has continued to hover in the early twenties. 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. 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.
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 temping to view everything Mangum released with an eye to the part it played in the Aeroplane story. 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. 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. 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. NMH's world is a place where sex is fumbling, a reliably imperfect expression of an emotion that dreamers want to see perfected. 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. 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.
Despite its vague and decidedly lo-fi profile, Avery also has its share of experimentation, and it's well integrated into the songs themselves. 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. 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 way Schneider and Mangum structured Avery, it feels like a suite, tunes bunched together with interludes and repeating motifs and details that fade away and then return a few songs later. The lurching "Marching Theme" may not have the memorable arrangement of the following record's instrumental "The Fool", but the surging fuzz guitar and odd, snaking keyboard melody form a superb bridge between the acoustic "Baby for Pree" and the electric variation on the same gorgeous melody that follows, "Where You'll Find Me Now". The simple horn and organ duet "Avery Island/April 1st" connects that to the comparatively fierce "Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone", and "Naomi" is another key Mangum track, not least for its strangely wandering melody. The closing "Pree-Sisters Swallowing a Donkey's Eye", 13 minutes on CD but 10 minutes shorter on vinyl, is a throbbing drone piece that sometimes touches on noise music, putting it in league with similar experiments by NMH's sister band, Olivia Tremor Control.
If Avery could reasonably be compared to other music going on in the Elephant 6 sphere in the mid and late 1990s, Aeroplane is where Mangum created something with no easy reference points. Mixing Salvation Army band pomp, hushed folk, roaring power pop, and almost unbearably intense guitar and voice songs that are difficult to classify, Aeroplane still feels like one of a kind, 14 years and countless inspired bands later. It's never not been a part of the conversation in indie rock since it was reissued in 2005, and suffice to say that it has lost none of its power. It's always been mastered loud and with a mix that puts Mangum's voice right in your face, and the remaster here is just a hair softer and rounder but otherwise wisely does little to alter its forceful sonic character. Aeroplane is the sound of an artist fully in tune with his creativity putting himself out there with an almost painful sense of vulnerability, and the reverberations from that statement are still being felt after a decade and a half. I wrote at length about the record when it was reissued in 2005 and don't have much to add here, except that the packaging and sound of this reissue are first rate. As an addendum, the gorgeous picture disc/poster sleeve 7" of "Holland 1945", backed by a live version of "Engine", first released in 1998, is nice to have in circulation.
Beyond the two proper albums, the box offers a mix of revelations and welcome artifacts. Early song "Everything Is" has been been released in various configurations over the years, as both a two-song 7" and as a proper EP, and it's included here in expanded EP form as a 10". Originally released in 1994, it finds Mangum in a much different place in terms of both songwriting and performance. This is where he felt most Elephant 6, enamored with the pop of the 1960s and doing his best to sing sweetly, in a higher and smoother register, to make his voice palatable. The title track and "Tuesday Moon" (once identified on a comp as "Love You on a Tuesday") are basically solid, down-the-middle guitar pop songs recorded crudely but with a hint of the spark that would lead to so much more. "Ruby Bulbs", the first song Mangum ever officially released, is raw and noisy and shouty and reflects Mangum's interest in aggro punk, an influence that didn't otherwise surface on his records. All in all, the Everything Is EP feels gestational and enjoyable but ultimately unexceptional; had things ended here, Neutral Milk Hotel might be as well remembered as E6 compatriots the Gerbils.
The Ferris Wheel on Fire 10" EP, on the other hand, is the real treasure of the set. Hearing Mangum in acoustic mode (there are seven demos here and a recording from an in-store), it's striking how much these recordings from 1992 to 1996 sound so much more like his later style compared to what was issued on Everything Is. "Oh Sister", from 1995 perfectly captures that moment of the growing boldness of his songwriting; the strums and vocals seem very "Two Headed Boy", and it has some melodic and lyrical motifs from that song. "My Dream Girl Don't Exist", possibly the most well-known unreleased Mangum song, feels like a dry run for Aeroplane, with strummed chords reminiscent of "The King of Carrot Flowers", lyrics about a dead girl in the ground, and a closing "now she knows she'll never be afraid" that was later used on "Ghost". The studio version of "Engine" is quite close to the version released on the B-side of the "Holland 1945" single, and other songs ("A Baby for Pree/Glow Into You", "April 8th") found their way to On Avery Island. Hearing acoustic songs and demos from the early days of Neutral Milk Hotel and marveling at how fully realized they sound, Ferris Wheel on Fire reminds me most of Time of No Reply, the posthumous collection of Nick Drake rarities and outtakes that evokes the sound of Pink Moon more than either of his two other properly released records. It's certainly a fans-only collection, but it also stands well on its own, with a unified sound and mood.
One 7" included on the record serves more as an extension of Ferris Wheel, with versions of songs released elsewhere. "You've Passed" and "Where You'll Find Me Now" both made it onto Avery. The first is not terribly different, it sounds like the basic arrangement and sound had been determined, but the fuzz guitar has more roar in the riff. The second is a welcome change-up: much slower, more downcast, less desperate, less naked. The other 7" has two versions of "Little Birds"-- one recorded at home, one with Robert Schneider-- which happens to be the one song here that was written after the release of Aeroplane. It's a harrowing composition that is dedicated to Matthew Shepard, who was murdered two months before the song was composed in December 1998, and its lyrics, "Another boy in town at night he took him for his lover/ And deep in sin they held each other/ So I took a hammer and nearly beat his little brains in/ Knowing God in heaven could have, never could forgive him," seem to reference the incident.
It's clear in spending time with this set and listening to it in varying sequences that Mangum the songwriter liked to tinker. On this evidence he was not prolific, but he also didn't waste ideas. Parts of songs pop up in other tracks, variations get turned into extended sequences, songs are divided into parts. The seven-or-so-year songwriting arc represented here yielded only about two-dozen completely distinct songs, and a clutch more that are variations on some of those themes.
An overlooked element of Neutral Milk Hotel's enduring appeal is that Mangum stopped making new music at the precise moment that music was about to become "an internet thing." A year after Aeroplane came Napster, and pretty soon the way we hear and experience music would never be the same. But Neutral Milk Hotel remain, as if preserved in amber, in that moment when independent music was bought in stores and spread by word of mouth that came from actual mouths. A moment when people had to hold something physical in their hands to be able to experience the music, whether tape, vinyl, or CD. And it's fitting that this box set has been assembled with care and high-quality materials that seem bound to last well into the time when the next generation discovers this music. "There are some lives you live and some you leave behind," Mangum sings in "Leave Me Alone", and it's such a perfect line for this guy. He left the music-making life behind for years, and now, maybe, he's inching back toward it. Even if he never gets there, whether by choice or because forces of whatever kind conspire against him, there's the music contained here, rich and beautiful enough to fill a career.
