•
Rating: The wicked Jeff Magnum perhaps hasn't realized how many people are still waiting for the third installment of this wonderful saga - ten years ago, now, dates back to the excellent "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea." But it seems that this enigmatic genius is absolutely not inclined to emerge from the silence he seems to have locked himself in, and it's a big pity.
Yes, because each song by Neutral Milk Hotel is an emotional heart attack gently tinged with a childlike innocence that hardly leaves one untouched.
We are in Ruston, Louisiana. Late 80s, full grunge explosion. Four childhood friends with a shared passion for music: Robert Schneider, Bill Doss, Will Cullen Hart, and Jeff Magnum. They all play their instruments a little, and they pass along homemade tapes just to see if anything clicks.
STOP!
(to the reader who already knows, or who gets bored reading too much, I allow you to skip this brief historical contextualization and go directly to the "PLUTZ!" below).
Here you’ll think you've figured it all out, and yet, according to a grossly probabilistic calculation, I can assert that the idea you have is totally wrong, unless you already know the subjects I'm talking about. So sit down/shut up and listen.
I was saying, four good friends starting to think about what they'll do when they grow up. Certainly, their dream is the same: to form a band and climb Mount Zion. But they can't throw themselves into the common pool of flannel shirts, maybe because they're too diverse and refined (intelligent?) to be assimilated by such a nihilistic crowd, perhaps because, while sensitive to the art-rock experiments of Sonic Youth and Minutemen primarily, they share an anachronistic passion for the pop of the Zombies and Beach Boys.
Everything starts to take shape from the moment the key figure of this story, Schneider, moves to Denver in 1991, to continue his university studies, while Will and Jeff head to Athens, Georgia, shortly followed by Doss. In these new environments, the old friends, continuing to stay in touch, soon weave a dense web of collaborations and friendships with other fellow students equally in love with music. The excitement caused by the group's thriving enterprise leads to the formation of a real Collective, "The Elephant Six Recording Company," an entirely independent organization that will enable the birth of some of the seminal bands in the indie pop domain during the 90s: namely Apples In The Stereo by Schneider, The Olivia Tremor Control by Doss and Hart, plus other followers like Elf Power, Of Montreal, Beulah.
And, indeed, the Neutral Milk Hotel.
Things weren't that straightforward after all.
PLUTZ! (Bored reader! Start reading again from here, okay?)
Jeff is a strange guy. A loner, it seems. I’ve never met him, but I like to imagine him this way: a person with messy hair, a fan of sweaters and chocolate, perhaps a little lanky, but deep in his eyes, when he looks at the World, a light reminiscent of the gaze of a child on Christmas.
But how cuddly must he be, Jeff Magnum. And it's good that he doesn't read Debaser, otherwise, he would have already been pissed off because I called him "cuddly." But it's the only word that comes to mind. And maybe he even collects plush toys.
For this first album, in 1996, our little genius does almost everything alone, calling alongside him the wise hand of the much-cited Schneider as producer, also taking advantage of his talents as a multi-instrumentalist, plus a few sporadic interventions from close friends. Not a real band, then, rather the work of a little puppeteer.
As in many debuts, here too we find the best of the quirky fruits that Jeff's mind has conceived over a long span of time. The heartbreaking anthems and flashy-party tunes that will make the fortune of the successor "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea," are still missing, but the hallucinated and fundamentally symbolist spirit is forcefully present in a decidedly lo-fi and raw key, not for this lacking charm: lovers of Pavement will surely at least break into a grin of satisfaction at the sound of the fuzz bass and saturated acoustic guitars that further prevent it all from descending into a trivial pop fluff. The opening track of the album, the highly catchy "Song Against Sex," sets the standard in this sense for what's to follow, with catchy harmonic progressions, a very distinctive voice not comparable to other artists around, I believe, and a feeling of freshness and genuineness wafting through the air. Jeff is also an excellent lyricist, and his lyrics, worthy of the best songwriting, manage to be visionary or melancholic as needed, but never trivial. Even an apparently innocuous ballad like "Naomi" conceals disturbing symbols between the lines ( Your prettiness is seeping through/Out from the dress I took from you, so pretty/And my emptiness is swollen shut always/Always a wretch I have become /So empty...is it about a fetishist? Well, maybe I'm the perverse one).
Psychedelic disturbances akin to a certain obsessive experimentalism are frequent, which Oneida will later embrace (the unsettling "Marching Theme," the lysergic coda of "Someone Is Waiting"), culminating in the 13 minutes of "Pree Sisters Swallowing A Donkey's Eye," in a Krautrock orgy under the aegis of some Indian guru.
The album thus remains between the coordinates of disfigured folk-song and psychedelic obsession, and listing every single track here would become useless and boring, as each represents a chapter in itself in a work that makes freshness and emotionality its main weapons. The airplane is ready, then, to set sail from Avery Island and cross the seas. Destination? Still unknown. But let's hope it doesn't remain that way.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
01 Song Against Sex (03:41)
And the first one tore a picture
Of a dead and hanging man
Who was kissing foreign fishes
That flew right out from his hands
And when I put my arms around him
Felt the blushing blood run through my cheeks
And an eerieness surrounded
When his tongue began to speak
And he said, "Oh, boy, you are so pretty,
Enough to wrap tight in rice-paper string"
And when I finally kissed him
The whole world began to ring
Lost like a bell that's tipping over
With two cracks along both sides
And I knew the world was over
So I took a look outside
And watched the fires that were reaching
Up to the weather vanes and the tops of trees
And the waiting scene and the Sunday dream -
They're all waiting here for me
Deli markets with their flower stands
Their pretty girls and their burning men
Hanging out on the hooks next to the window displays
And I took out my tongue, twice removed from my face
Across a bridge and across the mountains
Threw a nickel in the fountain
To save my soul from all these troubled times
And all the drugs that I don't have the guts to take to soothe my mind
So I'm always sober
Always aching
Always heading towards
Mass suicide, occult figurines
And wasted gas-station attendants
Attending to their jobs
And a nice drive in the country
Finds a nice cliff to drop off
Oh, when this life just gets so grating
All the grittiness of life
But don't take those pills your boyfriend gave you . . .
You're too wonderful to die
And the last one tore a picture
From the pornographic page
And all the pleasure points attacking
All the looks of love were staged
And it's a lie that you've been given
That just hurts you every day
So why should I lie here naked
When it's just too far away
From anything we could call loving -
Any love worth living for?
So I'll sleep out in the gutter
You can sleep here on the floor
And when I wake up in the morning
I won't forget to lock the door
'Cause with a match that's mean and some gasoline
You won't see me anymore.
03 Someone Is Waiting (02:31)
Someone is waiting
To swallow all the halos out of you
As your face blows
Through my windows
Sending pieces flying all around the room
And I love you
And I want to
Shoot all the superheroes from your skies
Watch them bleeding
From your ceiling
As their empty anger falls out from their eyes
All alone...
04 A Baby for Pree (01:21)
Blistering Pree, all smiling and swollen
Makes babies to breathe
With their hearts hanging open
All over the sheets as soft as beets
In some brown dresser drawer
And with bees in her breath,
And the rest of her ringing
They'll sting through her chest
With a force hard and beating,
'Till wonderfully wet she will get
Until she's soaked inside her clothes.
And there is no sorry to be sorry for,
For a roll around the floor
Some afternoon so sound and soft,
It made her swallow all her sweat
With every bit of breath she coughs,
And when the day it came to pour
All her babies all across the bathroom floor
She will be swimming in them all forever more.
06 Where You'll Find Me Now (04:04)
"All I perceive is wasted and broken
Silvery streams, sacred when spoken
Slam into me and into the ditch of debris.
And you smoke in the park, you sleep in the greenery,
Everyone barks but all still believing
To tear out your heart would send all your secrets to me,
But I let you down,
And swollen and small is where you'll find me now
With that silver stripping off
From my tongue you're tearing out,
And you'll never hear me talk.
Your teeth believe that teeth are for tearing
Tear into me and the scent of you sweating
Smells good to me, as long as we keep in our clothes
And out in the dark, the world is still rolling,
Kids in their cars, cigarette smoking
And all that they are, just reeks with the sweetest belief.
But I let you down,
And swollen and small is where you'll find me now,
With that silver stripping off
From my tongue you're tearing out,
And you'll never hear me talk.
All I could want is silver and spinning
Out from your arms and into the pretty
Pit of your heart - so simply and softly we'd flow.
But I let you down,
And swollen and small is where you'll find me now,
With that silver stripping off
From my tongue you're tearing out,
And you'll never hear me talk.
Into you I will glow.
Into you."
08 Gardenhead / Leave Me Alone (03:14)
There are beads that wrap
Around your knees that crackle into the dark
Like a walk in the park, like a hole in your head
Like the feeling you get when you realize you're dead
This time we ride roller coasters into the ocean
We feel no emotion as we spiral down to the world
And I guess it's worth your time
Because there's some lives you live
And some you leave behind
It gets hard to explain
The gardenhead knows my name
Leave me alone,
For you know this isn't the first time
In fact this is twice in a row
That the angels have slipped through our landslide
And filled up our garden with snow
And I don't wish to taste of your insides
Or to call out your name through my phone
For the glory boys at your bedside will love you
As long as you're something to own
Follow me through a city of frost covered angels
I swear I have nothing to prove
I just want to dance in your tangles
To give me some reason to move
But to take on the world at all angles
Requires a strength I can't use
So I'll meet you up high in your anger
Of all that is hoping and waiting for you
10 Naomi (04:53)
Your prettiness is seeping through
Out from the dress I took from you
So pretty
And my emptiness is swollen shut
Always a wretch - I have become
So empty
And please, please dont leave me
I'm watching Naomi, full bloom
I'm hoping she will soon explode
Into one billion tastes and tunes
One billion angels come and hold her down
They could hold her down until she shines
I'm tasting Naomi's perfume
It tastes like shit and I must say
She comes and goes most afternoons
One billion lovers wave and love her now
They could love her now and so could I
There is no Naomi in view
She walks through Cambridge stocks and strolls
And if she only really knew
One billion angels could come and save her soul
They could save her soul until she shines
So pretty
And please, please don't leave me here.
11 April 8th (02:47)
Crawl across towards your window
I'm calling softly from the street
always a lonely widow,
half-awake and sleeping on my feet.
I'm of age but have no children,
no quarter phone booth calls to home,
just late with television
inside my bedroom all alone.
Ooohhh ahh ohhh ohhh ohhh
There is no use in waiting
offer up your steps so I can climb,
show me all your figure paintings
etched in the middle of the night.
Let me stretch upon your carpet,
let me hear the rain tap on your street
knowing I am safe on the inside
blankets wrapped and drifting off to sleep.
Loading comments slowly
