Neutral Milk Hotel: Life We Used To Love
“something once vital ringing the edges of me”
After the release of their second album (which would eventually go on to receive critical and commercial success) and a year of heavy touring, Athens, Georgia, band Neutral Milk Hotel went on hiatus in 1998 and did not play together again until the fall of 2013. As part of an ambitious reunion tour, they staged a three-night homecoming at Athens's famous 40 Watt club, culminating in a “locals show" on October 24th. NAILED Contributing Editor Roy Coughlin was there.
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Jeff Mangum sings the final wordless sounds of “Oh Comely,” and the first woman I ever loved turns and hugs me. We are not young again, we are not returned to some previous selves, we are not reconciled seamlessly with our past; we are simply reminded of love and our connection to it and each other. The show could stop right here, one song in, and I would not regret a minute of, nor dollar spent on, the long flight from the West Coast to Georgia. The floor of the 40 Watt Club is filled with people, and scattershot throughout are the faces of friends and strangers I recognize from the 13 years I lived here. My heart is light but full, and I find it difficult to believe there could be room for anything else. But the show has just begun.
what a curious life we have found here tonight
I look around at the faces nearest me, familiar and strange alike, and we're all rapt. The build-up to this reunion practically dictated an expectation of let-down for me, but now that the tension has broken it is only good, so good. Neutral Milk Hotel had somehow escaped my attention until '99 or 2000, after the band had already called it quits (in retrospect it seems impossible that in a town as small and musically dense at Athens, I could have missed the boat, but I managed it), so I have no live experience to compare this performance to. But the band sounds together in a way I would not have imagined--delightfully ramshackle at times, especially on the fast, exuberant tunes, but never falling apart, somehow gathering all the fumbling, furious pieces together in a warm embrace. Jeremy Barnes rolls manically through his drum kit. Scott Spillane, when not playing horns better than I've ever heard him play, sings jubilantly along with every word. Julian Koster bounds around in the center of the stage with his bass like a wound-up toy. Everyone seems to be having so much fun. It feels exactly like an Athens show. I know now what I missed all those years ago.
From adolescence, all I wanted to do was play in a band with my friends. I moved from middle-of-nowhere rural Michigan to Athens, Georgia, in the mid-90s with my friend and girlfriend to make a go of music. But instead of playing shows, most of what I ended up doing was attending them. Athens is saturated with bands, and a shockingly high percentage of them are good. I spent so many nights in love, standing in some rock club or tiny bar or grubby punk house taking it in, so grateful. Living there, it's easy to take it all for granted, and I certainly did too, especially as the years stacked up. But early on, I couldn't believe how lucky I was to be at those shows. That moment, that feeling of This is what we're doing tonight, right here, together, band and audience, was always a profound one for me.
there's some lives you live and some you leave behind
it gets hard to explain
Tonight, Neutral Milk Hotel does not “put on a show” for us—they are simply old friends on stage again in a town that shaped and supported them, playing their hearts out for an audience of grateful fans and peers. People sing along—I sing along, helplessly—but we don't drown out the band, don't yell out for song titles, don't make demands. There is a hum of awe and respect (and again, gratitude) that runs through the room. That feeling of presence once more begins to rise over me. I should have seen it coming, but I am completely blindsided. We are here. This is the moment we're sharing together, tonight, all of us. This matters, if only for the next 90 minutes. It has been so long and I'd forgotten what it feels like, but I am mercifully returned. It's impossible that I could be the only person in the room with wet cheeks, smiling and buzzing.
The band's sound swells with the addition of more players, electric guitar, singing saw, accordion, keyboard, and those glorious horns echoing Mangum's own drawn and brassy cadence. They pull deeply from their full (if small) catalog, and everything sounds equally relevant. For the first time, I feel like I'm really hearing Mangum's words in the correct way. Maybe it's the moment, the weight of context, but the balance of micro and macro clicks for me: Intimate moments of love mingled with the immense movement of history, a celebration of life and a recognition of death and a kind of gratitude for the experience of both. And the band clearly feeds off the energy in the audience, allowing their joy to take the edge off the hype and expectation of the hundreds of people who have waited 15 years for this night.
can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all
I became a person in Athens, Georgia, in those years of hungrily consuming music and learning to be part of not only a scene, but a community. Neutral Milk Hotel's story reflects the bonds of friendship and art that Athens fosters. After Athens, I mostly stopped playing and going to shows. Some days it seems hard to believe that music was once a nutrient for me; other days it isn't hard to believe at all, the lack of something once vital ringing the edges of me like a high-water mark. I knew that returning for a Neutral Milk Hotel reunion would be studded with emotion and memory, especially with my so many people I care for there with me. What I never expected was to feel reunited with myself, if even momentarily.
After a couple of band encore songs, Mangum is once again alone on the stage. He begins “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2,” a song that beautifully closes the band's seminal album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It is deeply steeped in loss: of a father's son and of a brother's twin, and more universally the loss of something that for too brief a time was a part of ourselves. His voice begins urgently, the melody pacing the heavy strumming of the guitar. This is lament. “In my dreams you're alive and you're crying,” he sings, and I am broken right along with the narrator, grasping for the things I have loved. There is a kind of hope here, though. He leads us through the inevitable pain of love and loss, but somehow there is peace in his words, acceptance. The song suddenly slackens, his voice taking on the woody resonance of a bow pulled evenly over strings, running through a slower melody that breathes patience. The words are sad and strange, a curtain being drawn between one life and another, but somehow comforting, underscored by the fortune and joy of ever having lived at all.
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All italicized quotations above were taken from the Neutral Milk Hotel songs "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" and "Gardenhead-Leave Me Alone."
If you liked this, you might enjoy Roy Coughlin's Phosphorescent review. Read it here.