In the mid-’90s, Jeff Mangum moved into a haunted closet in Denver where he had dreams of women in fur coats drinking champagne, yelling at him to get out of their house. During a snowy Colorado winter, the Louisiana-born songwriter and his childhood friend Robert Schneider set about recording what would become Neutral Milk Hotel’s debut album. They worked feverishly, going out to smoke cigarettes when they hit a roadblock, until, in May of 1995, they had a finished record. The North Carolina indie label Merge scooped up the young band and quietly released On Avery Island the following March.
At the time, Neutral Milk Hotel were bit players in a wave of buzzy psychedelic indie pop. Virginia songwriter Mark Linkous released his debut album as Sparklehorse in August of 1995; Oklahoma City stalwarts the Flaming Lips released the cult favorite Clouds Taste Metallic later that same year. Beck’s omnivorous breakthrough Odelay and Super Furry Animals’ debut Fuzzy Logic both came out midway through 1996, while Grandaddy issued their first LP in 1997. The record industry was in the best shape it’s ever been in, and even majors were willing to take chances on messy, ramshackle bands that took cues from the 1972 psych-rock compilation Nuggets as they coasted on the drift of college radio powerhouses like R.E.M. It was a good time to make weird shit.
Unlike the Flaming Lips and Beck, Neutral Milk Hotel didn’t set their sights on breaking through to the mainstream. They subsisted happily as part of the Elephant 6 collective, a group of psychedelic musicians based first in Denver and then in Athens, Georgia, who played unlikely instruments like the singing saw and the accordion in each other’s bands. Alongside Neutral Milk Hotel, the collective included the Apples in Stereo, the Olivia Tremor Control, and Elf Power. They issued a few early records before most of their groups signed to established and better-resourced labels. In the midst of a college radio renaissance, Elephant 6 carved out a colorful niche.
On Avery Island earned a handful of positive reviews from music magazines, and after its release, Mangum got a band together and toured steadily. In February 1998, Merge released the band’s second album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, expecting to move about 7,000 copies. It did sell modestly at first, receiving warm but not effusive reviews in the music press. Mangum kept touring, and the band’s profile grew; fans showed up at NMH gigs knowing every word to his songs, and often sang them louder than the frontman did. Music magazines started asking for interviews, and Mangum found that he hated explaining himself. By the end of 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel turned down the opportunity to open for R.E.M. Disturbed by the unexpected success of his project, Mangum withdrew from music and spent a few years in a state of panic. Neutral Milk Hotel vanished almost as soon as it had arrived. And then music nerds figured out they could share mp3s with each other on the internet.
In the early aughts, Aeroplane became a cherished totem among people who hid from the world in strange music. A sweeping, surrealist concept album loosely based on the life and death of Anne Frank, its carnivalesque singalongs and horny, apocalyptic lyrics attracted people too young to have followed NMH while they were active. That the band was in stasis and Mangum gone from the public eye only added to the record’s mystique. It was just a few years old, but it felt like an artifact unearthed and shared covertly among those in the know.
Aeroplane might be an offbeat record—its unwieldy title, its songs about cum and communism, Mangum’s brassy, abrasive voice—but its songs are simple and tuneful enough to be played at expensive weddings. In 2005, the teen drama “The O.C.” featured a cover of the album’s title track in an episode, causing a mild uproar over possessive fans who didn’t want normies in their midst. But the word was already out, and Aeroplane became something of a sensation, a living record of an extinct band.
There are NMH devotees who will argue that On Avery Island is the better of Mangum’s two official LPs. It’s certainly less spoiled by exposure, and certain songs, like “You’ve Passed” and “Gardenhead / Leave Me Alone,” easily rank among NMH’s best. Within the fan community, On Avery Island served as a throttle between Aeroplane’s broadening pop appeal and the sprawling collection of bootleg concert tapes that could be easily snapped up via file-sharing programs. There are some curios in Mangum’s back catalog—minutes of unintelligible screaming, rackets of ear-scraping noise, a prank call where Mangum pretends to be an old man asking a phone sex hotline for bestiality roleplay—and there are also some of the most moving, sublime songs he’s ever written, preserved only in the tape hiss of early demos and live recordings. On Avery Island bridges these two worlds. It offers a glimpse of a pivotal songwriter in transition, moving from making shoddy cassettes for his friends to making art rock that spoke to untold thousands of lonely teens listening to pilfered mp3s late into the night.
All the seeds of Aeroplane can be heard scattered throughout On Avery Island. Mangum already balanced the gross and the transcendent in his lyrics: On “A Baby for Pree,” he imagines a pregnant woman full of bees who spews infants until they fill up her bedroom. Throughout the course of the rambunctious, trombone-heavy opener “Song Against Sex,” the speaker kisses another boy while the apocalypse sets in, complains about the porn he hates and the drugs he won’t take, and then lights himself on fire.
Certain songs hit closer to the bone than anything on Aeroplane. “You’ve Passed” envisions a woman’s spirit coursing away from the hospital where she’s just died, while “Three Peaches” articulates an uncanny emotional register between mourning and celebration as Mangum sings to a friend who survived a suicide attempt. It’s one of the hardest NMH songs to endure; Mangum sings from the very bottom of his diaphragm as if dredging up muck from beneath the earth’s crust, dragging out the words “I’m so happy” while sounding like he’s about to keel over with grief.
There are love songs here, too, like the effervescent “Naomi” and “Leave Me Alone,” and there are spooling, chaotic instrumental tracks: “Marching Theme,” which rolls along on a breathing drone, and the 14-minute closer “Pree Sisters Swallowing A Donkey’s Eye,” which rides the album’s final triumphant burst out into a slow-growing silence. The album veers wildly between the accessible and the inscrutable, like putting the Velvet Underground’s best-of collection on shuffle with excerpts from Lou Reed’s squalling feedback symphony Metal Machine Music interspersed. The abrupt transitions between perfect pop melodies and gaseous balls of noise lend the album a certain wildfire charm. It has less varnish than Aeroplane, and that raw face makes it a little easier to see into the mind of the guy who wrote it.
Aeroplane’s thematic ambitions can make it feel bigger than any one person: It’s an album about death and loss and evil, and about how human beings keep searching for the good in ourselves despite our long history of being awful to each other. On Avery Island’s scope is narrower. Mangum sings about himself and the people he knows. Instead of mountaintops and oceans, he sets his songs in bedrooms and public parks. His characters smoke cigarettes and hate themselves for being horny. They break up and hook up and yearn for each other like teenagers. They fall asleep on other people’s floors, listening to the rain hit the streets outside.
Mangum swirls mundane imagery into surrealist fantasy, sprinkling bizarre references to angels and halos throughout, as if contemplating an aunt’s ceramic cherubim while on an acid trip. Grounding these jerky lyrical turns are horns, organ, and fuzz bass, which all sprout distortion like moss. If Aeroplane sweeps you off your feet through time and space, rocketing back and forth between World War II and the present, On Avery Island roots you in the here and now, strange as it may be.
In their postmortem popularity, Neutral Milk Hotel would become a beacon for a glut of aughts bands who never quite achieved their idols’ specificity. Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Wolf Parade, and Beirut all sprang up on the ground Mangum cleared, mixing boisterous vocals with antique instrumentation. But even the most lyrically adventurous songwriters of the aughts never approached the way Mangum saw the whole world as if it were melting. On his first official release, he established himself as the sort of artist who feels everything at full volume, who bellows through the mess of his life because it’s the only thing he knows how to do.
I was biking home from a movie one summer night in Denver when it crept up on me, a feast of color illuminating the riverside trail. There is an old amusement park on the other side of the river from the buildings that make up the skyline. It pops into view unexpectedly when you’re driving on Route 25, a tangle of wooden roller coasters and Starflyer rides rubbing up against the Colorado sky. It looks out of place, especially at night, when it leaks neon into the dark. In “Gardenhead,” Mangum sings about a roller coaster that crashes into the ocean, and there’s a B-side from 1996, a fan favorite, called “Ferris Wheel on Fire.” On Avery Island is a theme park plopped down on a city: It rushes the fantastical into the everyday, conjuring the weird sensation of getting knocked loose from a rut into the intoxicating unknown of what’s still to come.
