Neutral Milk Hotel--

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (Merge 136)

Neutral Milk Hotel's new CD is rare and reet for the following four reasons

1) It's a concept album that works. Jeff Mangum wrote an impassioned ode to one 'Naomi' on the last album, so the guy has got the love-song/ stalker thing down. Well, this time it's Anne Frank, a whole album's worth all in the same key with repeating motifs and such. And before you start giving me jive about Mangum's Appollonaire-on-acid stream-of-consciousness rambles (but then they buried her alive/ with just her sister by her side/ now she's a little boy in Spain/ playing pianos filled with flames), understand that the over-all effect works. Because he's not just talking about Anne Frank. He could be talking about Barney Frank and it would still be great. Because

2) Nobody takes you through depression and out the other side better these days. Sure, this is depressing shit. How are you not going to be depressed by wholesale Nazi slaughter (leaving aside the Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS trilogy, to be sure)? But the whole band keeps playing, and the singer is so damned sure in the redeeming power of love that there is a positive explosion there at the end and we all go up in a big ball of the peace that passeth all understanding. Least, I do. But then again, I'm looking for hope. And this album has it in spades. You gotta go down before you go up, anyway. You know, karma.

3) I haven't met anybody yet who doesn't like it. All the way to the one-man Quiet Storm of Grip, Dan Poarch, who recently told me that all guitars give him embollisms. Even he likes it. Our house dog, Edie, who currently has large holes in her body courtesy of a Rotweiler attack, likes it. There is a noticable upswing in bent tail wagging when I put the album on. They must be doing something right.

4) It's my favorite album of 1998 so far. And so, of course, it should be yours as well.

----T. Magill