Neutral Milk Hotel

Ik zal hoop ik aan jou alles kunnen

toevertrouwen, zoals ik het nog aan

niemand gekund heb, en ik hoop dat

je een grote steun van me wilt zijn.*

Anne Frank, 12 Juni 1942

*I hope I will be able to confide everything to you,

 as I have never been able to do with anyone,

 and I hope you'll be a great support to me.

The need to transpose one's feelings in order to express them, thereby easing the soul's turmoil: this is certainly the main trait d'union, the almost indissoluble link between the introverted sensibility of a musician who expresses his fragile inner world through the poetry of his cryptic lyrics, and the dreamy innocence of a young Dutch girl who opens her heart to the pages of a diary, making it quiver with emotion beneath her fountain pen.

Although separated by more than fifty years of history, the frontman of America's Neutral Milk Hotel, Jeff Mangum, and the young Jewish girl Anne Frank (born in Germany but a refugee in Holland due to Nazi persecution) share an extraordinary expressive capacity, a communicative gift as light and airy as it is intense and evocative. Perhaps what also unites the two is an exceptional sensitivity, a kinship of feeling peculiar to "chosen spirits", who are able to recognize one another among millions of people. And this is exactly what happens: Mangum is so deeply struck by the words written in Anne Frank's famous diary that he makes it the primary source of inspiration and the guiding thread of Neutral Milk Hotel's second and final album, one of the most successful blends of folk-rock and psychedelia, an album regarded by much of the critics as the finest of the entire Elephant 6 output and generally considered among the absolute masterpieces of 90s independent music.

"In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" was born in a particular period of Neutral Milk Hotel's history: at the end of the "On Avery Island" tour, Scott Spillane (who along with Mangum, Julian Koster and Jeremy Barnes made up the "stable" line-up of Neutral Milk Hotel) moved to Athens, where Jeff and his girlfriend Laura Carter lived together with Koster and other musicians from the collective in a small house on the outskirts of the city. Here, surrounded by the familiar warmth of his friends, Mangum wrote most of the songs on "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea", blending assorted thoughts and memories jotted down in old notebooks with a strongly evocative imagery, more or less freely inspired by Anne Frank's diary, which forms the backbone of the lyrics.

The album was recorded in Denver, at Robert Schneider's (Apples In Stereo) "Pet Sounds Studio". Mangum was extremely demanding, rejecting any of Schneider's suggestions that even vaguely smacked of déjà écouté, going so far as to discourage the Apples In Stereo frontman from using techniques and instrumental textures he was too comfortable with: the pursuit of unusual detail, a hallmark of Elephant 6 productions, would find in this record one of its most admirable examples.

The album opens with a song in three movements. Officially split into two distinct tracks (marked "Pt. One" and "Pts. Two & Three"), "The King Of Carrot Flowers" can actually be considered a single piece in constant evolution, where the different parts, fairly easy to tell apart, flow into one another in succession: thus we move from the pure atmospheres sketched by acoustic guitar in "Part One", embellished by a melancholy bagpipe, to the starkly ascetic tones dominated by Mangum's voice at the start of "Part Two", which soon ignite into a hyperbolic spiral of percussion and horns, culminating in the whirlwind drum explosion of "Part Three", until the rhythm section's furious race against time is halted by an unexpected approving "ok" that silences everything.

The lyrics shift in tandem with the changes in mood, moving between cryptic references to Jeff's childhood blurring into Anne's, and evocative moments of intense spirituality, free of any religious meaning despite appearances. On this last point, the lyrics of "Part Two" as printed in the booklet are particularly interesting: in place of the initial heartfelt "I Love You Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ I Love You, Yes I Do" that rises over "The King Of Carrot Flowers" like a sudden mystical illumination, Mangum felt the need to add a clarifying note, specifying that the eternal love he hails at the start of "Part Two" (celebrated again several times throughout the album) "is not based on any religion but more on the belief that all things seem to contain a white light within them".

"In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" is marked by the recurrence of numerous stylistic and expressive motifs, which "The King Of Carrot Flowers" seems to anticipate, at least in part, almost like a summary abstract that also serves as an introduction to the whole record.

Throughout the album, bucolic acoustic interplay of disarming clarity ("In The Aeroplane Over The Sea", "Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two", "Communist Daughter") alternates with energetic, more or less tight guitar strumming ("Two-Headed Boy", "Oh Comely") that often bursts into full-bodied electric awakenings, enriched by a triumphant instrumental chorus that lends the songs an imposing, regal power ("Holland, 1945", "Ghost").

The songs are unmistakably "signed" by the entrance of exotic or unusual instruments, though their distribution across the album is far from even, depending naturally on the different contexts in which they appear: we go from the spectral whispers of the singing saw, settling like a diaphanous shadow (Anne's ghost?) over the luminous elegy of the title track, to the melancholy dialogue of euphonium and zanzithophone that glides through the ending of "Oh Comely", wrapping it in warm autumnal hues, all the way to the hefty, majestically weighty jubilation of the uilleann pipes on the untitled tenth track (listed as " " or as "10"), which together with the solemn march of Spillane's bagpipes on "The Fool" (the only track not penned by Mangum) makes up the album's sole purely instrumental moments.

Jeff's voice, pitched mostly in the mid-to-upper register and marked by a barely perceptible touch of roughness, on one hand tends to lighten the dark atmospheres occasionally created by the instrumental architecture, while on the other, with its often chant-like cadence and faintly nasal timbre, it steeps the songs in a pervasive sense of anxious inevitability, at times reaching the peak of a suffocating anguish.

The conflicting feelings that populate the album are considerably amplified by lyrics rich in strongly evocative "psychedelic" visions. The theme of death recurs frequently, with numerous references to Anne ("I know they buried her body with others, her sister and mother and 500 families") intertwining with plausible allusions to personal experience ("And dad would dream of all the different ways to die, each one a little more than he could dare to try"). The bleak, at times funereal atmospheres thus outlined are redeemed by a faint glimmer of hope for the future and a positive faith in change ("But now we must pick up every piece of the life we used to love just to keep ourselves at least enough to carry on"), though they ultimately find resolution in a state of idyllic rebirth, a resurrection as material as it is spiritual ("And when we break we'll wait for our miracle, God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life"), which always remains allegorically distant from any apparent religious overtones.

To these images are added those of love, which in a few rare moments portray with extreme delicacy the heart's intense flutters, but more often venture into the hidden realms of intimacy, sketched through scattered, fragmentary details that are nonetheless often so explicit as to create an extremely powerful visual-emotional impact ("The movements were beautiful all in your ovaries"), sometimes bordering on the risqué ("Semen stains the mountain tops"), even brushing against moments of macabre horror ("Your father made fetuses with flesh licking ladies").

What emerges forcefully from "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" is a sense of shadowy frustration and painful powerlessness which, set against the rare moments of serene, confident "optimism", forms the dominant mood of the whole album. For a sensitive personality like Mangum's, the ongoing inner battle against the ghosts of his own fragility and insecurity, and the awareness of the (human!) impossibility of healing the world's ugliness, is too heavy a burden, one that weighs on his soul and wears it down bit by bit. This whole turmoil of feelings is deeply reflected in the album's atmospheres and lyrics, and would become one of the main factors behind Mangum's eventual creative crisis at the end of the triumphant "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" tour.

Among the few moments of sweet, total surrender to daydreams, the most significant is certainly the title track, considered by many the true manifesto of Elephant 6, since within the unhurried calm of its melodies, and above all in the luminous enchantment of its lyrics, lie those very same ideals of universal peace and brotherhood that underpin the American collective's creed. The atmospheres of this song carry the listener back in time, perhaps aboard some fantastical "synthetic flying machine", perhaps on the very Dadaist aeroplane-gramophone pictured in the artwork, reviving the carefree freshness and crystalline innocence of Anne Frank, standing like giants of light to tear through the darkness of a grimly hostile Nazi Holland.

Fifty years on from those events, a songwriter from across the ocean will raise his own hymn of hope to Anne's glory.

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17/06/2008