Blast from the Past: Neutral Milk Hotel's On Avery Island

Normally all talk about Neutral Milk Hotel and their legacy in the music world begins and ends with their magnum opus In the Aeroplane Over the Sea . The album has stood for ten years now as one of the finest independent releases ever and has influenced a generation of musicians that has come since. But people forget there are two Neutral Milk Hotel records, and though In the Aeroplane... is the better of the two records, to ignore On Avery Island would be foolhardy and wrong.

Released in March of '96 On Avery Island was a record that was far ahead of its time. In a world that was being dominated by grunge and gangster rap Neutral Milk Hotel just did not fit in. They had a style that was all their own in every possible way. They recorded differently, played differently, sang differently, and wrote differently, and all of it pointed to an under the radar release that caught the attention of a handful of very lucky people. Those people generally applauded the lo-fi recording style and the quirks of Jeff Mangum's songwriting style, and for good reason considering how many people coped the methods that went into this album. Even Aeroplane wouldn't have been possible without this record before it.

Musically On Avery Island began to set the style that would become a hallmark of the Elephant 6 sound. Lo-fi recording, lots of top hisses, loops, and a varied instruments all went on to become parts of what all the E6 bands would try to do. But as much as it affected what was to come later people still were not able to totally copy what Jeff Mangum was able to do with his record and his songwriting. For most of this record Mangum pushes the envelope in his songwriting. There are cryptic and harried elements throughout each song all barely managing to stay together under the tremendous weight of a world he had created for this album. Few people had ever written songs of this nature, maybe someone like Michael Stipe would be a near comparison but even that reaches quite a bit. Mangum is really on a plain all his own with the way he develops a concept through an album and builds within it elements of his own psyche and strange turns of the tongue. It's a very impressive, thoroughly enjoyable writing style and few have come anywhere near matching him since.

As far as the Neutral Milk Hotel conversation goes people will almost always begin and end with In the Aeroplane Over the Sea , but hopefully some of you will start to remember the greatness that was On Avery Island and will get it back into your regular listening rotation soon. It is an understated masterpiece and if Jeff Mangum ever returns to the stage I hope he'd perform just as many songs from this record as he would from the more famous one.
Neutral Milk Hotel - "Some Against Sex"
Neutral Milk Hotel - "Someone Is Waiting"
Neutral Milk Hotel - "Marching Theme"
Neutral Milk Hotel - "Three Peaches"
(Editor's Note: With this being the first Blast from the Past of the year I wanted to take a moment to illustrate the path that this column will take this year. We will be posting four different types of Blast from the Past in each month, these will celebrate the 20th anniversaries of Merge Records and Matador Records, the continued substantial output of the 33 1/3 series of books, and my own brand of guilty pleasures that I have often written about here. I'm doing this to add a bit of structure to the column and also to celebrate albums I wouldn't normally highlight here. Also, the Merge and Matador records highlighted here are the records that won't necessarily make the Top 20 lists I have planned for those record labels later this year. I hope you all enjoy the small changes made here and that you will take some time to listen to some of these records that should be cherished and enjoyed for a long long time.)