Neutral Milk Hotel: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL: IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA (1998)

1) The King Of Carrot Flowers, Part 1; 2) The King Of Carrot Flowers, Parts 2 & 3; 3) In The Aeroplane Over The Sea; 4) Two-Headed Boy; 5) The Fool; 6) Holland, 1945; 7) Communist Daughter; 8) Oh Comely; 9) Ghost; 10) Untitled; 11) Two-Headed Boy, Part 2.

General verdict: Introducing St. Anne Frank as the Holy Protectress of all vocally challenged indie kids.

[Note: This is a slightly revised and restructured version of an older review that originally appeared in the short-lived Important Albums series.]

For all the solid memories that this album left behind it, there is not a whole lot of significant background to its appearance. In 1998, the world sure as hell was not expecting to be taken by storm by a slightly non-conventional singer-songwriter, armed largely with just an acoustic guitar and a bunch of his trumpet-blowing friends — the taste-based, creatively demanding part of that world was getting accustomed to living in the age of King Yorke and Queen Björk, and the indie kids, I suppose, were mostly happy that the massive «underground sellout wave» of the early 1990s, spearheaded by Nirvana, was finally over and they could now have their new basement idols all to themselves, to be shared and admired in small insider circles. That seemed largely to be the deal with the Elephant 6 bands — largely due to the self-conscious «archaicness» of their sound, as well as an intentional lack of excessive promotion, their fanbase was never too huge, but it was loyal, and critics tended to respect them, too.

Nevertheless, out of all the impressive musical baggage that the Elephants had accumulated over more than two decades of existence, not a single piece of product earned as much retrospective admiration as Neutral Milk Hotelʼs second and last record. Its rise to fame did not occur until sometime around the mid-2000s, by which time it began to be proclaimed as not only the best Elephant 6 album ever made, but one of the best albums of the 1990s and, eventually, one of the best albums ever (and I have even seen with my own eyes written fan claims to it being the best album ever, period). Consequently, it might make more sense to discuss not the background of the record itself (which is largely a personal matter of Jeff Mangumʼs), but the reasons why it took so long for it to break out of the cult classic status into a much more mainstream conscience;  and, indeed, when you confront it with the indie rock scene of the 2000s, everything from Arcade Fire to Beirut and beyond, it is possible to see how it was really somewhat ahead of its time in 1998, and how it would better appeal to an early 21st century conscience than a late 20th century one. But read on to find out.

Almost symbolically, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea was recorded at the Pet Sounds Studio in Denver, Colorado, installed there by Robert Schneider — who also continued to serve as producer for these sessions, which took place in the summer of 1997. Although Neutral Milk Hotel had previously been just cover-up name for Mangum, at this particular stage the «band» was officially expanded to include Julian Koster on keyboards, Scott Spillane on brass and woodwinds, and Jeremy Barnes on drums, with all three musicians playing a very significant part and largely responsible for the majority of stylistic changes from On Avery Island. (Several additional musicians are also credited, including Schneider himself on piano and organ, Michelle Anderson on bagpipes, and Laura Carter on a wonderful instrument called the Zanzithophone — I mean, surely you do not expect a band called Neutral Milk Hotel to exist and not to use the Zanzithophone? Itʼs a phonetic match made in Heaven!)

That said, a huge chunk of the album does consist of nothing but Mangum and his acoustic guitar, which is why the «singer-songwriter» moniker can still safely stick around — the bombastic arrangements tend to be secondary compared to the sparsely arranged parts, and the music is largely taking orders from Mangumʼs poetic and artistic vision, rather than vice versa: a vision that was largely inspired by the manʼs immersion into The Diary Of Anne Frank, even if his own reaction to it, as could be expected, was seriously different from the average laymanʼs perspective. Nor is it unexpected that Mangum would disband Neutral Milk Hotel the very same year that the album was released: a perfectly natural move for a certified loner/maverick who feels much better on his own than surrounded by bandmates. The fact that he has made very few public appearances or released any new music ever since only confirms the mystery (and makes him an even tastier object of admiration for the wound-up hipster in need of a holographic companion with a permanently broken heart).

Naturally, the album did not sell much upon its original release; today, however, Billboard charts mark more than 140,000 copies sold as compared to but a measly 5,000 for the recordʼs less fortunate predecessor, and — perhaps not surprisingly — most of these copies seem to be vinyl ones rather than CDs: cool works of art like these should be owned on something more classy (and long-lasting) than a cheap laserdisc. (For even better effect, I do believe that the vinyl LP should be sold in a twin package with a bottle of Domaine De LʼEcu Muscadet — double the charm in an unforgettable mix of pleasure and misery!). Likewise, the amount of panegyrical reviews on professional and amateur websites has been increasing in geometric progression for the past 10 years, pretty much burying the entire Elephant 6 scene under them: poor Robert Schneider (a very cool and talented musician himself) only wishes, I guess, that he could have at least a dozenth part of those accolades, and by now it seems that his case is pretty hopeless. Let us try and see why that is for ourselves.

First things first: it is useless for me to try and pretend to be an admirer of this album — for the most part, its charm fails to work on me, and without that magic touch, its flaws vastly outnumber its virtues, or, at least, are so serious as to throttle its chances of being counted as a masterpiece, let alone «the greatest album ever made». But still, virtues first, and the first virtue of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is this: IMHO (which stands for «in my honest opinion»), Jeff Mangum is anything but a poseur. And, yes, that is an important point. Any dickhead (excuse me) can pick up an acoustic guitar, glue some generic chords together, write some bad poetry, and pretend to be making us all a generous donation of the unique, insightful vibes of his unique, insightful personality. Some of these dickheads might even be lucky to grab a recording contract, and a few are luckier still to get airplay and publicity — and this almost automatically guarantees some sort of fanbase, because people are plenty and people are strange. (Then thereʼs truly magical stuff, like the combination of a dickhead, a beard, and a secluded log cabin... oh, do not get me started). Well, to cut to the chase, I am certainly not Jeff Mangumʼs biggest fan, but he ainʼt a dickhead — ʽEverything Isʼ had already shown us that he has got some talent to burn, and he is not burning it in a conventional, mass-marketed furnace, which usually comes along with the instruction «whine and bleed and mix tears and blood and write IʼM SO VULNERABLE with them on your sleeve» (the recordʼs, that is). He is definitely a more intriguing figure than that.

I am also not going to pretend that I «understand» any of the manʼs intriguing lyrics, or even properly «get» whatever it is for which he is using Anne Frank as a symbol (because, if anything, In The Aeroplane is not a Holocaust tribute, not even a thickly veiled one). I do not think they matter nearly as much as the majority of the albumʼs printed or web-published descriptions would have you believe — in fact, I do not even think that there are any specific «key lines» here, like there are in Dylan songs, to act as primary stimulants, and I do believe it is pointless to make wild guesses about why the boy is two-headed, or why "semen stains the mountain tops" (this seems to be the most commonly debated and discussed line in the whole album, BECAUSE GROSS GROSS GROSS) and what precisely this has to do with the communistʼs daughter. What matters is that he sings it as if it all made sense — with intonations that alternately suggest blunt peasant admiration of some heavenly beauty, unmotivated outbursts of passionate village idiocy ("Jesus Christ I love you" is a prime example — not the words, of course, but the way they are delivered), insistent, tense pleading (the entire ʻOh Comelyʼ is one large tearing plea), and an odd brand of sermonizing, as when you get chased in the street by some crazyass sect member who does not even speak your language too well, but he knows he just got to make you understand, or his soul will be forfeit.

Roughly speaking, this is a sincere album, communicated to us in its own tongue that makes as little sense verbally as it does musically. From a musical standpoint, the one thing that stands out about Aeroplane is its odd stylistic melange — at its heart lie some very simple, very repetitive acoustic guitar patterns, and if the only thing to disrupt them were the occasional breaking out of thick distorted power-pop electric guitar, that would be comprehensible; but much of the time, the music is accompanied with zydeco accordeons, the already familiar New Orleanian brass (the guy was born in Louisiana, after all, remember?), various old-fashioned organ overdubs, and all sorts of disconcerting, disorienting sound effects that give the feel of a hot, damp, lazy afternoon, teaming with organic life but no sense of direction or purpose whatsoever. No wonder that the individual songs are rarely memorable, and the entire record runs on atmosphere/feel rather than actual melodic hooks. Although, admittedly, I would not be so honest if I said the record is completely devoid of them: ʻHolland, 1945ʼ is as good a folk-pop song as any, and would have sounded great on any country-western album with a banjo on my knee. It is certainly the merriest song about Anne Frank ever written, that is for sure, and is bound to send her spirit pirouetting in the sky. (Actually, here is a great idea for an aspiring filmwriter: how about a script where Jeff Mangum dies from a broken heart and goes to Heaven and actually finds Anne Frank and plays her In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and... and...?..)

Anyway, it is pretty easy to see why the record was singled out of the entire Elephant 6 backlog: it obviously makes an effort to suck you inside this guyʼs personality, offering you a certain spiritual vibe to adopt for your own purposes, and it is quite intimate — unlike any track by, say, Apples In Stereo, many of which are musically superior but never convey the impression of «coming straight from the guts». It is more of a singer-songwriter album than a psychedelic pop album, and yet, at the same time, it has enough elements of psychedelic pop to make it superficially more attractive than the average folkie confessional. And although Mangum still comes across as way too normal to truly qualify as «1990ʼs Syd Barrett», there is a definite echo of Syd in him — the aura of childishness, the ability to move from happiness to depression in a twinkle, and that passionate, unquenchable desire to tell you something, make you understand at all costs, even if it is practically hopeless because we do not really speak the same language. And he does that without being too gloomy, like Elliott Smith, or too romantically distant, like Jeff Buckley. I mean, you could probably have this guy as your friend, even if youʼd probably have to keep an eye on him lest he burn down the kitchen or something. Right?

But here come the problems. Let us pick at a single song for starters: to my ears, ʻOh Comelyʼ sounds plain unbearable. Six minutes of musically trivial acoustic strum, accompanied with sincere, but sonically brutal singing from a guy who — let us put it mildly — was not born and reared for this kind of singing; good old Keith Richards couldnʼt have done a worse job than what Mangum does here, especially when he tries to go real high at the end of each verse. Honestly, I do not know about you, but to me, this is plain sonic torture, and I have no idea why I should be enduring it, or why I should respect this awful off-key vocal racket as a symbolic representation of sincere, unadorned suffering. (And I do not even have a proper idea of what he is suffering about — is it horror at Anneʼs fate? or desperation at the fact that she is there and he is here and she canʼt "let her skin begin to blend itself with mine"?).

The thing is, I am as much of a sucker for sincerity and originality as anyone, and I heartily welcome unconventional approaches to singing and playing (I do love Björk, remember?), but the problem with Aeroplane is that its approach is not «unconventional» — it is simply un-existing. There are no special instrumental or vocal techniques that Mangum is cherishing, he simply plays and sings it as it is, to the best of his knowledge and skill, and, well, his best is just not good enough. Most of the instrumental guitar melodies here could be played by a kid after several months of training in folk music, and most of the vocal melodies could be nice if they were sung by somebody who actually bothered just a bit. (And let us not even start on people like Dylan or Tom Waits, who could sing and did it with gusto, unconventional as their approaches were). Worst of all is the inadequacy — if you canʼt, donʼt, but he still does. I do believe that if only these songs were delivered in a more quiet manner, without the man trying to set off a nuclear chain reaction with his vocal cords, they would have produced a more positive impact (in fact, when he is quiet, his voice can even be pretty: the "what a beautiful face I have found in this place..." start to the title track is one of the albumʼs loveliest moments). As it is, he just ruins his own sincere image with this pushing-too-hard trick. Of course, it is not much of a problem if you are tonedeaf (which seems to be quite a regular case with indie kids... okay, never mind), but what about the rest of us?..

Another thing that seriously bugs me is that the sincerity and artistic vision of Mangum is way undercut by the superficial trappings of «cool». Whatʼs up with all those song titles? What do carrot flowers have to do with Anne Frank? For that matter, what has Anne Frank to do with anything, and isnʼt he confusing her with Alice in Wonderland? Why does the lady on the album cover have no face? Why are we supposed to believe that quasi-New Orleanian big band instrumentation provides the perfect interludes between primitive acoustic folk patterns? Where, for that matter, does the artistʼs sincerity end, and at which particular point is it replaced by «empty cool»? Every time I want to trust this guy and empathize with him, he offsets me with some bit of nonsense or other, and, honestly, I just do not have the time or wish to go over that nonsense and interpret it as symbolic wisdom (thereʼs tons of text written on that by amateur admirers over the Web, with hundreds of interpretations that all contradict each other and are just about equally worthless).

Finally, a truly great album is supposed to be irreplaceable within a niche of its own; but at least in purely musical terms, the albumʼs mix of street folk, jazz, and big brass arrangements has certainly been one-upped since by Beirut — and, for that matter, Zach Condon as a romantic loner is hardly that less intriguing than Jeff Mangum, although he is clearly quite the better musician and singer, which is probably why he does not get nearly as much veneration as Neutral Milk Hotel (nor does he torture his voice to generic acoustic guitar patterns). In other words, I just fail to get the exclusiveness of this proposition. Outstanding melodies? No dice (if thereʼs any catchiness here, it is mainly because Mangum has done some folksy homework and seems to be heavily pilfering from folk and country-western). Unique arrangements? Somewhat, but not that unique any more. Haunting vocal tones? You bet — haunting enough to lead one to an early grave. Mind-blowing concept? Couldnʼt really say, and there is something pretty disturbing about the way he slobbers over Anne Frank, to tell the truth. So is there anything left?.. Well, technically, yes, but certainly not enough for me to regard this album as much more than a curiosity, with occasional shots of loveliness scattered across a sea of failures. 

I do know for a fact that many people sincerely love this record, and there is certainly no harm in that (at least, it is definitely less offensive than late period Aerosmith), but it does worry me a little, because the albumʼs musical backbone is really thin, and if its meteoric rise to popularity in the early 2000s really reflects a certain Zeitgeist, it would just show how little people care about the actual music these days, and how much they care about «self-expression», even when the «self-expression» in question is clearly a mystery, and it is hard even to understand when the guy is being sincere and when he is being tongue-in-cheek, let alone be certain of yourself — that you are really getting in tune with whatever it is he is trying to communicate. (This Iʼm saying simply because, no matter how many texts there have been written about Aeroplane, not a single one of them has made me believe that the author truly «gets» Mangum's message — and, as a result of that, that the «message» even exists in the first place).

So why not just take it off the frickinʼ pedestal already, one that even Mangum himself could not probably have dreamt of in his worst nightmare, and just take it for what it is — not one of the greatest albums ever made, but an interesting fusion of the impressionistic singer-songwriter with the starry-eyed psychedelic troubadour, seriously flawed, at times overwrought, more personal and intimate than its Elephant 6 brethren, but much less musically competent than oh so many of them? To quote the (quite undeniably) wise Albert King, "had you told it like it was, it wouldnʼt be like it is". Quite a peculiar situation, really, although far be it from me to hold any kind of grudge against the record or blame Jeff himself for all the inadequate reaction. For consolation, I would like to state that ʻHolland, 1945ʼ at least belongs on any respectable, representative compilation of 1990s psycho-pop or Elephant 6 anthology, and perhaps the title track as well.

Neutral Milk Hotel: On Avery Island

NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL: ON AVERY ISLAND (1996)

1) Song Against Sex; 2) Youʼve Passed; 3) Someone Is Waiting; 4) A Baby For Pree; 5) Marching Theme; 6) Where Youʼll Find Me Now; 7) Avery Island / April 1st; 8) Gardenhead / Leave Me Alone; 9) Three Peaches; 10) Naomi; 11) April 8th; 12) Pree-Sisters Swallowing A Donkeyʼs Eye.

General verdict: Lo-fi singer-songwriter stuff with psychedelic overtones — the doctor may have ordered this back in 1996, but it is unclear just how long it is going to last.

Recorded in Denver and produced by Robert Schneider of The Apples In Stereo (Schneider is also the second most important musician on this record after Mangum, despite never having been an official member of Neutral Milk Hotel), this is Mangumʼs first and next-to-last fully fledged LP — whose title is a geographical reference to Louisiana, but whose music is anything but, unless one counts the musicʼs overall loudness, bragginess, and occasional use of the trombone as an indirect or subconscious tribute to New Orleans.

On Avery Island never quite reached the level of critical or fan adoration that would be heaped on its follow-up, but truly the only difference between it and Aeroplane is that it is expectedly less ambitious — well, less ambitious on everything but the final track, a 14-minute long drone whose actual musical content could be summed up in twenty seconds: I think that even most of Mangumʼs most devoted admirers would, at best, mutter something about the possible conceptual importance of this piece, and that it takes a very special kind of person to sit through the trackʼs main «ringtone-on-endless-loop» section even once, let alone twice. I have no idea what Mangum had against The Pree Sisters, a short-lived musical outfit that released a few long-forgotten soft pop singles in the early 1970s, but if the composition does really convey the effect of swallowing a donkeyʼs eye, I advise everybody to stick to larksʼ tongues instead.

With that silly piece of «letʼs-find-out-what-that-button-does-while-weʼre-still-young-and-stupid» crap out of the way, what we are left with is about 35 minutes worth of real music that is a very good reflection of the mid-1990s indie spirit: worship of the psychedelic Sixties + in-yer-face lo-fi values + cryptic post-modernized lyrics + non-trivial annoying personality tottering between mental instability and narcissism. One listen to the album is well enough to understand that Jeff Mangum is not your usual average person, and that he is very talented; many more — in my case at least — are needed to get a feeling of what it is that he actually has a talent for.

It would be very difficult to find an argument for melody: pretty much all of these songs seem to be constructed from fairly time-honored chord sequences that Mangum must have lifted from his heroes. Thereʼs a little Dylan here, a little Donovan, some Syd Barrett, a bit of Fairport Convention, perhaps (or any other Celtic folk-influenced band from the past), and quite a bit of The Incredible String Band, though Jeff could only wish for the kind of musicianship that Robin Williamson and Mike Heron demonstrated in their prime. And since most of the arrangements are quite similar — the usual trick is to have a clean acoustic guitar ringing in one channel and a heavily distorted semi-acoustic in the other — it takes quite a while to learn the differences between the songs, other than «fast» and «slow».

A few of the numbers try to incorporate elements of poppiness, like the opening ʽSong Against Sexʼ, but while on Everything Is the future direction was not yet quite clear, On Avery Island makes it perfectly obvious that, despite hiding behind a «band» moniker, Mangum clearly tries to model himself after the singer-songwriter pattern (quite unlike his pal Schneider), and many of the tunes are slow confessional ballads whose effectiveness fully depends on Mangumʼs words and Mangumʼs sonic clothes for said words.

The words, ultimately, are what matters: Mangum comes across here as a skilled and curious lyricist, able to find fresh ways of looking at birth, life, love, death, and whatever shit might lie in between. Letʼs face it, not just anyone is able to express oneʼs feelings with lines like "Someone is waiting to swallow all the halos out of you" or "And I love you and I want to / Shoot all the super heroes from your skies", regardless of whether you find this imagery pretentiously stupid or amazingly witty. It is not as if any such word-weaving has not been tried before, but it seems to me to be a much better reflection of Mangumʼs own individuality than whatever musical back­ground he tries to set these words to. Much of it feels like improvised streams of consciousness, where it is useless to try and decipher every line (unless you have a degree in psychology) but useful to latch on to occasional keywords and key phrases that represent the lyrical heroʼs journey through the ups and downs of life.

Interestingly, at this point the ups still seem to outweigh the downs — quite a few of the songs, like ʽNaomiʼ, are straightforwardly psychedelic love serenades ("Iʼm hoping she will soon explode into one billion tastes and tunes"), though still somewhat offset by the love-and-hate relationship that the lyrical hero has with himself ("my emptiness is swollen shut"). On Avery Island is still quite obviously a record by a person who likes to see the world in colors rather than whine about how nobody else does, which is, by the way, a circumstance that makes me more at peace with Mangumʼs voice on this record than on the follow-up — although he still isnʼt much of a singer (or a player... or a composer... but yep, he is an artist all right). For that reason, the album still has some officially certified ties with the Elephant 6 movement, and I guess it can be legitimately brought out with you to a picnic site or something.

A few of the songs are psychedelic instrumentals, most notably ʽMarching Themeʼ that sort of sounds like a ton of Scotsmen on amphetamines (spoiler: amphetamines win by the end), and ʽAvery Island / April 1stʼ, whose half-pop, half-baroque trombone solo by Rick Benjamin might be the most purely musical moment on the entire album. They do work primarily as interludes, though, just in case you happen to forget that this is a psychedelic experience and not just a set of impressionistic songs about moms, sons, girlfriends, and bathroom reflections. On the other hand, it is hard to take that statement seriously when the very first track on the album is called a ʽSong Against Sexʼ — insert the required joke about how difficult it really must be to get laid when you are making this kind of music in the first place — anyway, whoever in his right mind would make an anti-sexual psychedelic album?..

If you did not get this already, I do not think that On Avery Island is a particularly good album. Mangumʼs poetry deserves attention, but it is hard for me to understand how this manner of presenting it could be endearing to anybody who was not 16–18 years old at the time when it came out. The biggest deficiency, though, is the personality. You could argue, if you really wanted to, that composition-wise, the stuff on Syd Barrettʼs solo albums was nothing to write home about either, but the combination of childlike innocence, deep melancholia, and drugged-out immobility in his voice was haunting even when the material was rotten. Mangum never had the same sad, terrifying magic in his voice, and for the most part, his singing is very neutral: not too pretty, not too awful, nothing in particular (except when he wrings out his higher notes, which can be murder on sensitive ears). In the end, it all comes down to the right attitude in the right chronological context — and geographical, too, so you might really want to read up on your Avery Island history before committing to this experience.

Neutral Milk Hotel: Everything Is

NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL: EVERYTHING IS (1994)

1) Everything Is; 2) Here We Are (For W Cullen Hart); 3) Unborn; 4) Tuesday Moon; 5) Ruby Bulbs; 6) Snow Song Pt. 1; 7) Aunt Eggma Blowtorch.

General verdict: Derivative, but charming lo-fi psycho-pop — although for it to be interesting in the 2010s, youʼd probably have to understand all the importance of the 1960s for the 1990s.

Since the artistic reputation of Neutral Milk Hotel rests on such a small body of work, I suppose it makes sense to allocate a special review to the very first piece of that work which Jeff Mangum saw fit to submit for official commercial distribution. Originally, it was just one short single with but two songs on it, distributed by Seattleʼs indie label Cher Doll Records — then, in 1995, it fell into the hands of the British label Fire Records, who re-released it with an extra track, and this three-song version could be claimed to be the definitive form of Everything Is, since the three tracks more or less comprehensively cover all the bases that would later go on to form part of the Neutral Milk Hotel legend.

ʽEverything Isʼ is an excellent specimen of early Ninetiesʼ lo-fi, one-man psychedelic revival — distorted blues-pop guitar riffs taken from the good old garage-rock textbook; well-articulated nerdy vocals with an otherworldly touch, probably achieved through double-tracking; and surreal daydreaming lyrics that update ʽLucy In The Sky With Diamondsʼ for the contemporary listener. Additionally, I seem to detect a bit of a Brian Eno touch here — funny enough, the verse melody is very similar to ʽKurtʼs Rejoinderʼ from Before And After Science, and the similarity gets even more in your face because of the tonal resemblance between Jeff Mangum and Eno when they are in calm / quiet mode (it disappears every time Jeff goes up the scale in the chorus). This could be just a total accident, but since there is no denying Enoʼs general influence on the Elephant 6 community and on each of its representatives individually, I thought this worth mentioning.

Anyway, ʽEverything Isʼ already tells you almost more about NMH than you needed to know — how Mangum could craft second-hand, but solid melodic hooks, how his lyrical craft bravely advocated for a return to the ideals of old ("everything is beautiful here / Iʼm finally breaking free from fear" is such a major fuck-you to the angst-ridden alt-rock narrative of the time), and how you were free to take or leave snippets of sound collages and random conversations that he liked to insert in his work. A quarter century later, this revivalist ideology seems a bit fruity, and its impact is probably no longer understood by anybody who was younger than 15 years at the time, but the "and itʼs fading..." hook is still fun, and the song in general benefits from a complete lack of unwarranted pretentiousness that would follow in its wake.

If ʽEverything Isʼ is Eno-ish, then ʽSnow Song Pt. 1ʼ is quite naturally Syd Barrett-ish: its lazy acoustic guitars and even more lazily purred vocals, filling up your room like some subtle wisps of musical shisha, are recorded in the grand tradition of The Madcap, which, unfortunately, also means that the song is not likely to remain in your brain as anything other than an atmospheric cloud. I do find it funny how many different verbal influences are subconsciously affecting Mangumʼs mind here: "Cindy smiles in overcoats" (ʽCindy Tells Meʼ — Eno again), "candy-apples everythings" (ʽCandy And A Currant Bunʼ + ʽApples And Orangesʼ = Syd), "unhappy girl, sheʼs spinning" (ʽUnhappy Girlʼ = Jim Morrison), "rain is a perfectly sculpted garden of wetness" (ʽRainʼ = The Beatles) — I do not know about rain, but the song is most definitely a perfectly sculpted garden of references to cherished customers at the Neutral Milk Hotel.

The third track, ʽAunt Eggma Blowtorchʼ once again recalls Eno (ʽPaw Paw Negro Blowtorchʼ), except that it is largely just a sound collage, allegedly recorded by a 17-year old Mangum in his bedroom. It has nothing to offer other than historical interest and some signs of a curious, hyper-active searching mind looking for blissful revelation in unpredictable combinations of sound: no use looking for true artistic symbolism or suspenseful atmospheric coherence here — ʽRevolution #9ʼ it is not. But if you are 17 and you make up a sonic collage titled ʽAunt Eggma Blowtorchʼ, you may have a very bright, unusual, and painful future before you, which is exactly what happened to Jeff Mangum, so at least things check out.

The convoluted story of Everything Is does not end here, however. The next phase begins in the posthumous era: in 2001, the single was re-released on Orange Twin Records, with the addition of ʽTuesday Moonʼ, another upbeat pop song with a hazy nasal charm, but rather clunky lyrical twists ("I just want to climb your tower / To your dress like apple pie" — is this written from the perspective of a garden ant or a cross-dresser?). Finally, a 10" version of the record appeared in 2011 on the fully autonomous Neutral Milk Hotel Records — adding three more early tracks, of which ʽHere We Areʼ is an unquestionable highlight, if only for its unusually clear production: the acoustic guitars ring out loud and pretty, the slightly out-of-tune electric overdubs are almost nostalgically raga-like, and the vocals are soothing (Mangum does have a very pleasant voice, as long as he does not drive it over into higher range, at which point it becomes annoying).

From a certain point of view, even though the music would go on to become more complex and the lyrics would go on to look less like the naïve scribblings of a high schooler in love with John Lennon and Syd Barrett, all you really needed to know about Jeff Mangum and his one-man band is already encapsulated in this small bunch of tunes. Well, almost all: one thing that is clearly missing is the tragic brokedown-artist approach, which, honestly, could not yet be represented at such an early stage. This is a young and somewhat bizarrely optimistic Jeff Mangum, whose visions and aspirations have not yet had the chance of being ground down by cruel world reality. I mean, how could it be otherwise, with almost every song featuring a reference to candy, ice cream, and teacups? So catch this guy while he is still busy being a butterfly.