Neutral Milk Hotel
On Avery Island

THE REVIEW

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.