It’s still kind of inconceivable that anyone, let alone South Floridians, are seeing Neutral Milk Hotel live in the year of our lord 2015.
From 1998, at singer-songwriter Jeff Mangum’s artistic pinnacle, to 2011, you could count the number of Neutral Milk Hotel live performances on less than one hand. Just as Mangum had begun to scale the (semen-stained) mountaintop of success, he vanished into willful obscurity, retreating into hermetic isolation and Y2K paranoia.
For those of us too young to discover Neutral Milk Hotel during its first tours, the band began to seem like an almost mythical relic of its mid-‘90s time, its pair of LPs like talismans to be worshipped: These were recordings transmitted not from a human being’s skill and imagination but beamed in from a more otherworldly place, the same source that drove Syd Barrett and Daniel Johnston to twisted genius while dispatching them to mental oblivion.
NMH’s 1996 debut On Avery Island is a fuzzed-out indie-rock classic, but in hindsight, its unorthodox lyricism and instrumentation seem like the tapas whetting appetites for the main course: 1998’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Mangum’s fraught concept album about Anne Frank. Today, in the era of mp3s, iTunes Shuffle and shortening musical attention spans, Aeroplane demands to be listened to in proper succession, as a heartbreaking, transcendent narrative experience, its imagery dark as it is vivid, its music as alternately clean and clear and as it is sloppy and seemingly filtered through broken speakers. Mangum’s lyrics explored women’s reproductive organs, sexual awakening, reincarnation, pianos filled with flames, and brains falling out through teeth, his voice reaching fevered emotional pitches that would, proudly, cause no chairs to turn on The Voice. The record’s imperfections have solidified its genius.
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Then, burnt out from touring and from the endless battery of media interviews from writers asking the same mundane questions, Mangum disappeared, taking Neutral Milk Hotel with him. For at least 13 years, he funneled his singular musical personality into field recordings of Bulgarian folk music and occasional studio work for his friends in the Elephant Six Recording Collective. In the meantime, we memorized every lyric on Aeroplane, and the die-hards among us memorized On Avery Island too. We forced ourselves to be content with the countless YouTube bedroom covers of NMH songs by Mangum’s increasing horde of admirers, who salivated over whatever sonic remnants—a single post-Aeroplane song, a mediocre live album, a 2011 compilation of unreleased early material—that found their ways into our earbuds during this lost decade, while hanging on every false rumor about a potential reunion tour.
And now, on May 6, after years of limited touring and festival appearances, it is finally happening, the indie-rock equivalent of the second coming of Christ: Neutral Milk Hotel is playing Miami for the first and last time ever, and I’m still waiting for somebody to pinch me. The lineup that recorded Aeroplane will be joining Mangum, their panoply of unusual instruments in tow, for a balanced selection of songs from both albums and a smattering of B-sides, to an audience of hungry fans who have been waiting to shout along with these songs for a very, very long time.
For the Florida dates, Neutral Milk Hotel is bringing along Mind Brains, a psychedelic supergroup that conjures Olivia Tremor Control and the inchoate experimentation of the early Elephant Six movement. Composed of former members of OTC, of Montreal, the Music Tapes and others, Mind Brains records on nostalgically outmoded instruments—think the Electric Autoharp, the Toy Drum Machine and the Casio SK-1—that have been reconfigured without losing their junked-out color. Mind Brains is supporting its self-titled debut album, and the band is ideally suited as an NMH opening act, hailing from Mangum’s old stomping ground of Athens, Georgia. Its music is heavy on tape loops, fuzzboxes and theremin, creating a hypnotic sound that thrives on an uneasy border between a haunting funeral and a surrealist carnival.
At the time of this writing, there are still a few tickets available in the veritable nosebleed section of the Olympia Theatre, 174 E. Flagler St. in downtown Miami, for the May 6 performance. They run $30 each, which, for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, sounds like a bargain. The show starts at 8pm. Call 305-374-2444 or visit olympiatheatre.org
~ John Thomason
Neutral Milk Hotel King of Carrot Flowers live at The Covered Dish (Gainesville) June 27, 1998
Neutral Milk Hotel “Oh Comely” live at The Covered Dish (Gainesville) June 27, 1998
