Like many of its Elephant 6 counterparts (Olivia Tremor Control, Apples In Stereo), Neutral Milk Hotel has its origins in the small town of Ruston, Louisiana. The Elephant 6 collective was formed there by a group of childhood friends who shared a love for music that no one else in Ruston seemed to know (much less care) about. The intervening years have seen the members of that core group spread across the country, each following his own musical calling. While Olivia Tremor Control cultivate their (seemingly endless) creative impulses to sublime effect, and Apples In Stero have restored pop songcraft to the artform it was always meant to be, Neutral Milk Hotel are to many the heart and soul of Elephant 6.
Jeff Mangum has always been Neutral Milk Hotel’s central figure, and he’s used that moniker for everything from his own solo excursions to marching band-like musical happenings. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea marks a new phase for Mangum and his namesake. The group’s debut album, On Avery Island, was a wonderfully dense hodgepodge of song and sound, an ambitious, eclectic work that reflected the nomadic lifestyle that Mangum and his friends shared at the time. But the past two years have brought a stability that the band never had (nor wanted) before.
Mangum is still NMH’s principal songwriter, and IN THE AEROPLANE, OVER THE SEA contains even more solo acoustic compositions than its predecessor. But, in a nice turn of irony, it’s also the most collaborative NMH offering to date. Gone (for the time being) are the days of hop-scotching across the country, living in closets and sleeping on floors. For some time now, the four principal members of NMH have lived together in Athens, Georgia. And though you could hardly call it domesticated, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea possesses an intimacy, and a sense of purpose, that only comes from shared experience. It’s even more conceptual than its multi-layered predecessor, taking on history, faith and spirituality as some of its central themes. But the group’s aim was not as much to reinterpret these themes as to rediscover them. The result is a very personal, and not always pretty, stream-of-consciousness account of what was gained from the experience. Listen carefully.
