by Grace Robins-Somerville (@grace_roso)
On the non-album live favorite “Engine,” Neutral Milk Hotel frontman Jeff Mangum rolls through “endless revisions to state what I mean.” This line is probably the best summation of The Collected Works, a full-discography box set that Merge Records has released to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Neutral Milk Hotel’s breakthrough record, 1998’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. It’s been over a decade since the band has toured, and even longer since they’ve released new music. Now they're inviting us into a treasure trove of things both said and unsaid.
Listening to a Neutral Milk Hotel album can feel like leafing through a stranger’s family photo album, the kind you might find in the cluttered back aisle of an antique shop. You hold in your hands a faraway relic of someone else’s history, dusty and delicate. It’s an artifact of a specific era, yet it seems to exist outside of time. The distance and the closeness are wrapped up in each other, resulting in something that simultaneously sounds like a product of a bygone era and years ahead of its time, even today.
This anachronism-kaleidoscope effect is due in part to the music itself, but just as much by the mythos surrounding Neutral Milk hotel, the Elephant 6 Collective, and Jeff Mangum himself. What started with experimental sound collages and homespun cassette tapes distributed among friends “ended” with Mangum’s disappearance from the public eye following Aeroplane’s critical and relative commercial success.
This box set includes both of Neutral Milk Hotel’s full-length LPs, remastered versions of 1994’s Everything Is EP and the Ferris Wheel On Fire EP (recorded in the early 90s and initially released as part of the 2011 box set), the 2001 solo live album recorded at Jittery Joe’s Cafe, and additional previously unreleased material. As the box set’s lead single, Mangum shared two versions of “Little Birds”-- a shelved studio demo recorded in late 1998 and a live version recorded at the Prospect Park Bandshell during Neutral Milk Hotel’s 2014 reunion tour. Inspired by Mangum’s run-in with a homophobic street preacher in Athens, Georgia, “Little Birds” is one of the darkest and ugliest songs that Mangum has ever penned, his intonations acutely capturing the lengths that fundamentalists will go to in order to justify atrocities, all under the guise of “God’s will.”
The unflinching horror of “Little Birds” stands out among Mangum’s catalog, though not because he’s normally one to shy away from singing about the worst of human potential. Neutral Milk Hotel’s cult classic– though at this point it’s arguably transcended cult status and can simply be referred to as a classic without the “cult” qualifier –was largely informed by Mangum’s fascination with Anne Frank and her family, their experiences hiding from Nazi persecution, and the horrors that came after the end of Frank’s diary. Man-made evil pervades Mangum’s songwriting, the terrible visions that haunted Mangum himself are manifested in his lyrics. His discography has a body count too high to keep track of; many of these deaths are young, all are senseless.
Still, he somehow manages to find a strange sweetness in all the violence and decay, exemplified by the Ferris Wheel On Fire EP. “My Dream Girl Don’t Exist” is a mournful love song detailing the possible demises that could’ve taken away the narrator’s soulmate before he had the chance to even meet her. He grieves for someone who he doesn’t even know ever existed, the abstract shape of her absence surrounding him and making him feel the full weight of losing something he never had. The mournful “Oh Sister” interpolates lyrics and melodies from what would become Aeroplane standouts like “Communist Daughter” and “Oh Comely.” Among purple prose about family heirlooms, cave paintings, and flowering orange trees, Mangum hides lines like “She don’t need you or won’t fuck your friends” in plain sight. There’s something striking about a line as explicit and uncharacteristically direct springing from the mouth of someone whose penchant for esotericism and metaphor is a cornerstone of his lyricism. The song “I Will Bury You In Time” sounds like a murder ballad, but according to Mangum it’s a fantasy about “being down on the beach in San Diego and being in a hole with a rockstar and making out.” The EP’s title track details a ferris wheel malfunction, and it’s breathtaking in all senses of the word. A romantic carnival ride turns lethal, and as bolts come loose, the fire rages, and festival-goers fall to their deaths, the narrator clings to his beloved in a fruitless effort to keep them together. The giant ring of fire rolls on, bright and beautiful as it destroys everything in its path.
The timeless magnetism of Neutral Milk Hotel is equal parts childlike whimsy and abject horror. The songs off Everything Is lean all the way into the former to a surreal extent. The resulting effect is not unlike that of an old-timey cartoon drawn with a thick black outline and faded, once-bright colors– quirky, cute, more than a little off-putting. You can hear it in the screeching “Ruby Bulbs,” the buzzy sound collage of “Aunt Eggma Blowtorch,” and the non-sequitous, spoken-word interview samples that open “Everything Is” and “Tuesday Moon.” When Mangum first moved to Athens, he would walk around the city with a tape recorder and interview strangers. Those patchworked-together snippets lend themselves beautifully to the scrapbook/time capsule quality of his discography– and the larger DIY ethos of the Elephant 6 movement.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the warm, tongue-twisting rattle of “Here We Are (for W. Cullen Hart).” As the title confirms, the song was written for Elephant 6 cofounder Will Cullen Hart, who played in Olivia Tremor Control and illustrated the cover art for various Elephant 6 records. Mangum’s lyrics sum up the spirit and staying power of the collective so affectionately– the communal, anti-corporate creative process and how it resisted marketability, their wide-eyed naïvité juxtaposed with wise-beyond-their-years storytelling, their eccentric takes on everyday life that may seem nihilistic on the surface but carry a profound reverence for simple moments of beauty that are too often taken for granted. It’s a reminder of why people keep returning to these records years later and why the music has taken on a sprawling life of its own even decades after Neutral Milk Hotel’s disbandment. Its history is immortal and ever-evolving, “it splits inside the summer sky / it’s softly cascading on.”