"I'll Be Laughing with Everyone I'll See"- Neutral Milk Hotel Live at Liberty Hall

I was worried going into Neutral Milk Hotel's set at Liberty Hall last night. Not for anything relating to the band mind you. I've seen them twice before, lead-singer Jeff Mangum once, and instinctively knew it would be an all-encompassing emotional event. There would be the sparse howling of "Oh Comely," the galloping "Song Against Sex" and the heavenly death mediation of "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea." Everything would A-Okay in that regard.

I was worried because I was going to the show solo. Even when I'm covering an event, I generally hate going solo because I love talking music with people. I run this blog to share and rhapsodize about music. So being "stuck" at a show is worrisome because all of that enthusiasm is bottled up. That's incredibly true of an NMH show where five different nerves can be struck on the same song. When those nerves are blocked, when you don't have anyone to connect with, it can be crippling.

Those concerns were ultimately unfounded though because it was Neutral Milk Hotel I was seeing. If there are more inclusive fan-bases in music, I’ve yet to find them. NMH is one of those bands where if you look around at the crowd you know you’re on the same sonic wavelength. It takes a particular sort of person to hear earnest poetry in lyrics about Anne Frank and "placing fingers through the notches in your spine." It’s incredibly strange because Mangum’s lyrics are so intentionally cryptic that rallying around them shouldn’t be possible. They’re so tightly coiled, and he so personally reserved with his wild tangles of hair, that getting into the band’s world is an uphill slog on the level of Micky Ward trying to win in The Fighter.

But once you’re in, you’ll "wait for the rest of your life" as the line in "Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2" goes. The crowd at Liberty Hall was in before Magnum even took the stage to hammer away on the chords of Ferris Wheel on Fire cut "I Will Bury You in Time." Everyone around me lost their shit when the similarly bearded Scott Spillane came out to tune up his trombone. In all deference to Spillane, who is so splendidly puckish in the way he sings along to the lyrics when he’s not playing, a crowd that’s enthralled by the mere presence of a trombone player is one that will eat up anything.

And for the span of an hour-and-a-half, the sold-out crowd did just that. They head-banged to "Holland, 1945." They went silent for severely underrated On Avery Island tracks "Baby for Pree" and "Gardenhead." Mass hypnosis happened during the acid-folk/baroque march of "The Fool" where Spillane’s horns cried and Julian Koster’s accordion wearily exhaled. The roof could’ve caved-in at that moment and no one would’ve noticed for what was happening on stage. We all did our best warbly Mangum impersonation when he creakily declared "There is no reason to grieve" in "Two-Headed Boy."

Realistically, the line is one of the best pieces of advice you could offer to anyone worrying about the future of the band. This will be their last tour for a while, and considering they previously went dormant for a decade, things look pretty dim. The notion was reinforced by Mangum who was uncharacteristically warm at times when he would put his hands over his heart in gratitude to the fervent crowd. 

But like my fear of going alone, the band’s absence doesn’t matter. People who weren’t even alive when either of their albums dropped in the mid-90s continue to find them. There will always be a community around this band. Even when they go away their music will be around. It’ll be around to cry over, to laugh with and to giddily rock out to. There’s no reason to grieve.  

Neutral Milk Hotel at the Pageant

In the midst of Neutral Milk Hotel's performance at the Pageant last night, I had what I can only refer to as a "Radiohead moment." As the group segued from the ferociously strummed "Two-Headed Boy" into the clamorous brass instrumental "The Fool" I effectively "lost myself." It was a span of 30 seconds at most, but then and there it felt like an eternity. I recalled the first time I heard their sophomore (and still most recent) record In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I remembered listening to it from the backseat of a Dodge Caliber on my way to a family member's funeral, thinking this was the only thing I could make sense of. And a blur of times during my collegiate career smeared together where I turned to the band when nothing else would suffice. And as I drew out of this malaise, I couldn't help but wonder what loves and losses it'd be soundtracking down the road in my life. 

Only with a band like Neutral Milk Hotel, where past/present/future commonly intermingle is this sort of experience even possible. A melange of processional music, punk rock, Appalachian folk, and globe-hopping experimentation the band itself embodies the "time-machine" frontman Jeff Mangum warbles about in "Oh Comely". 

That time-machine approach came remarkably fast and fresh during the Athens-based group's run-throughs of tracks from the less-heralded On Avery Island. The energy and abandonment the band played with on "Naomi" was an attempt to reckon with the demons of expectations In the Aeroplane Over the Sea left behind. Multi-instrumentalist Julian Koster with an accordion in tow, spun around on-stage like an out-of-control carousel as Mangum found guitar chords with steely intent. Jeremy Barnes' drumming was controlled but spastic. He'd malevolently glare at a crash cymbal only to flail wildly across the toms. By the time the track wrapped up, Magnum's simple reminder "this song's called Naomi" would not be forgotten. 

This same energy threatened to bleed the band dry in "Baby for Pree"/"Where You'll Find Me Now".  For a band that's set a certain stake on cacophonous music, it still scanned as the one of most sweeping numbers of the night. A vital component of the cacophony is that lack of distinction between times. Koster's short-circuiting Moog synthesizer in "Ferris Wheel on Fire" pointed to a mechanical future where everything fails, while the bleating horns brought to mind 1920s New Orleans. 

Even still some of NMH's best material stands outside of time or place and last night's set was no different. The raucous "Holland, 1945" creates an alternate timeline where lyrical folkies drop acid and beat the Sex Pistols to punk. "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" swipes chords from the Penguins "Earth Angel" and retreats to a mystic locale "circling all 'round the Sun." When "everyone's waiting" as Mangum suggests in the galloping "Song Against Sex", chronological details stop mattering.

The acoustic meditation of "Oh Comely", which came late into the set killed all forward momentum. That any howls were elicited during the rabid epic spoke more to audience excitement to hear NMH that their enthusiasm over girls being lowered into graves. And as the enthusiasm died, the greatest aura of the band stay behind. There was Jeff Mangum alone on the stage, one of "popular" music's few remaining enigmas. Now masked by a forest of hair his movements are impossible to discern. The band reformed after more than a decade of dormancy with no stated motives. Though they tell of "holy spectacles" in the final whispered fragments of "Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2", the band (and Mangum in particular) have always avoided any sort of spectacle.

Up and Over We Go

In the Time Machine Over the Sea

Screenshot from the Neutral Milk Hotel inspired RPG.

File this under the category of too good to be true. 

At least one very enterprising-gamer known as BroPortal has made legions of indie-kids day with this Neutral Milk Hotel based role-playing game. The RPG, entitled In the Time Machine Over the Sea throws you into a world where you are NMH frontman Jeff Mangum and Anne Frank is your girlfriend. In the game, whose plot is loosely based off of the band's sophomore release In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, you hangout with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and eventually fight Adolf Hitler.

In other NMH news, Mangum fresh off a well-received set at All Tomorrow's Parties in Asbury Park, NJ performed an impromptu-set at the "Occupy Wall Street" rallies in NYC this past Tuesday. Mangum played several songs from In the Aeroplane, with a captivated crowd singing along. Before his show in August, Mangum had stayed in the shadows, avoiding live shows since the release of In the Aeroplane in 1998.

Jeff Mangum "Occupy Wall Street" set (40 min)

In the Time Machine Over the Sea download link: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XSXJVGQC