Neutral Milk Hotel: the reopening

By Hazel Sheffield

For more than a decade, Jeff Mangum seemed destined to become the Harper Lee of indie rock. With the release of “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” (1998), the second album from his band Neutral Milk Hotel, he had been hailed as either a crackpot or a genius. His lyrics depicted a phantasmagoria of penny-arcade freaks and second-world-war tragedy, conjuring up two-headed boys in jars, faces filled with flowers and flies, and semen on mountaintops. Ragged brass gave the stories a lovely solemnity, but it was Mangum’s voice, a breathless, reedy wail, that really impressed upon you what he saw when he closed his eyes.

A year later he abruptly stopped touring amid rumours of a mental breakdown, and many fans gave up hope of ever seeing these rich, fleshy songs performed live. Neutral Milk Hotel lived on as a pop-culture reference—John Green put them in “Will Grayson, Will Grayson”, the young-adult novel he wrote with David Levithan—and as an influence, inspiring some excellent younger acts from Arcade Fire to Bon Iver.