Neutral Milk Hotel's opus turns ten this Sunday. Feel old? If you love it, it's one of those albums that imprints itself on your psyche. One of us remembers exactly where he was when he brought it home from the record store the week it came out, sat down and listened to it next to a piano in a girlfriend's father's house ... and those first rushed, hushed lines of "King Of Carrot Flowers Part 1" were enough to choke a person up, even when they barely knew what was going on, hadn't gotten the Anne Frank thematics. Right then, it was just this quick, gorgeous snapshot of innocence lost in a surrealist, sad atmosphere: "And your mom would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulder / And your dad would throw the garbage all across the floor / As we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for..." And it went from there. People have asked us why we didn't follow
OKX or
Drive XV with a Neutral Milk Hotel covers tribute. Well, for starters, the eleven songs are so intimately interwoven, falling and resting upon each other through organ sustain and held notes and ghosts, that to have different acts tackle them would prove disappointing, no matter who we got to play Mangum's part (voices singing through him, notes bending beyond reach, a tongue in his teeth). Plus, even though this album is about Anne Frank -- or, better put, Mangum's reaction and relationship to
The Diary Of A Young Girl and the life behind it -- the emotional resonances feel so intimately connected to their presentation. A cover couldn't nail that. You need to live on a diet of tomatoes and radio wires to get it. Or fall in love with someone who was buried alive in 1945. His "God is a place where some holy spectacle lies / And when we break / We'll wait for our miracle, / God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life" strikes us as formative in indie-rock God references. We're only partly kidding.
Why does it continue to be so influential? Beyond the lyrics, there's the use of singing saws, horn arrangements (holy, Beirut), accordion, banjo, etc. There's a reason the official NMH site links to Harry Partch. Of course, In The Aeroplane was influential for folks beyond Zach Condon -- the ragtag sense of composition, the patchwork jug-band. Right, what came to be known as "the Elephant 6 sound." But unlike most E6 participants, NMH injected a real emotion into the interesting backwoods psychedelic compositional sense. Actually, of Montreal has gotten closer with more recent albums (tracing trips to Norway and a relationship's ups and downs), but it's hard to get past all the glitter sometimes. What else? Let us count the ways...
