Neutral milk hotel

seelafa

Member
did/does anyone here like them? my friend, who i consider to have an excellent taste in music, says both of their LPs make him vomit. yet I love both of them and I think Aeroplane over the sea is easily the greatest record of all time. It is sort of an indescribable feeling i get, especially "two head boy part II" the honesty in jeff mangum's voice and the lyrics it feels like i'm in his consciousness, and the fuzzy carnival hippy-commune instrumentals and dirges makes it feel like a dream ... hopefully someone on here has at least heard the record! I just had to try and get your opinions because i am curious about it.
 

tom pr

Well-known member
I haven't listened to it in ages, but Aeroplane's one of my all time favourites. You should read the 33 1/3 book on it if you haven't already...

Edit: and speaking of it sounding like your dreams, the back of the 2005 re-release has a quote from Boom Bip saying the exact same thing. I still think the last couplet on the record, followed by Mangum getting up and pulling his stool away or whatever it is, is one of the most heartbreaking moments ever.
 
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CHAOTROPIC

on account
Aeroplane's a beautiful record. Unashamedly simple structures, really direct & harsh & unfashionable but just punchy enough & so it still works for me even after all these years. Nice dissonance in the bagpipes & Jeff's voice. Good lyrics. & he's properly crackers too, which shouldn't matter, but it does matter.

Treads a fine line between twee neurosis, & fucking excoriating, & treads it well.

There was a great interview with him on, I dunno, Radio 1, or something, years ago, where the interviewer quite clearly hasn't listened to a single thing he's ever done, has never heard of him, & spends twenty minutes talking awkwardly about the album cover while Mangum slurs incoherently on what sounds like twenty quids worth of ketamine. Appallingly funny & I nearly did a small wee.
 

tom pr

Well-known member
There was a great interview with him on, I dunno, Radio 1, or something, years ago, where the interviewer quite clearly hasn't listened to a single thing he's ever done, has never heard of him, & spends twenty minutes talking awkwardly about the album cover while Mangum slurs incoherently on what sounds like twenty quids worth of ketamine. Appallingly funny & I nearly did a small wee.
It's from Xfm. There used to be a website with obscene amounts of Magnum-related stuff to download, but I don't know if it's still running.

Speaking of Mangum being mad, he's one of the few recent American rock musicians I can think of that there's a real air of mystique about: all the stuff about the album driving him a bit mad and disappearing to go back homemade films about snails, and in the last couple of years showing up at odd Olivia Tremor Control shows to do vocals. The whole band seemed a bit loopy to be honest; there's an anecdote in the book about how Jeremy Barnes got really freaked out by the idea of television, and so when someone bought a TV for the squat that it sounds like half the Elephant Six collective lived in and out of, they had to keep it under a sheet whenever he was in the room.
 

Sick Boy

All about pride and egos
My mate was playing that Aeroplane Over The Sea or whatever album while I was at his house yesterday, and I listened to it back in High School, so I was listening to it with new ears again.

While some songs are good in this riotous, drunken, sing-a-long folky way, when that singer goes for the high notes you just want to put your fucking head through a wall.
 

spooky girlfriend

Wild Horses
me and a friend have a slightly different slant on Neutral Milk Hotel, Apples in Stereo, Olivia Tremor Control, all these Elephant Six bands of the 90's...he's a musician and obsessed with musical form and songcraft so it's all rooted in the Beatles thing, all those bands had the 60's influences fresh in the their minds i think and were out for a kind of psych-pop revival. basically yeah i think they're cool. save the nostalgia for erm the Offspring
 
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