Neutral Milk Hotel - On Avery Island

On Avery Island. It's a salt dome in Louisiana, where Tabasco is made. It's also the first full album by Neutral Milk Hotel.

You're supposed to relate it to Beck, Flaming Lips, and Guided By Voices, all siblings of the musical marriage of John Lennon pop with Syd Barrett psychosis. Sure, you can hear all of that in there, but there's something different happening too. This is the sound of depression itself. The grotesque distorted lows, a middle layer of intentionally poorly recorded cheap sounding instruments, on top of which floats an abstract but clearly personal string of folk songs about how horrible it is to live life as a mere function.

Nobody has much to say about the confusing juxtaposition of dirty and clean recording. Yes it's a 4-track recording (DIY home recording was the whole label roster's main interest), but Robert Schneider clearly knew what he was doing. The vocals, trombone, and percussion are crystal clear. It's the fuzz bass and guitars that get the full recycled tape from the garbage can, recorded in said garbage can treatment. You're supposed to be singing those amazing melodies over top of the deep nausea and suicidal malaise. It really is a sad carnival in your ears.

It's not lyrically morose or offensive, but it sure isn't happy or hopeful. Just like the toll bridge to the actual island, you're free to leave but you gotta pay to get back in, especially if you live there.

I love it (just in case my descriptions were confusing you). Lots of people say it's actually better than Aeroplane, but that depends on what you mean by "better." It's definitely sadder, harsher, and less stable sounding; as in this is before the mental snap, In the Aeroplane... after. Obviously, you're not going to crank this up at the gym or at your next patio party, but as a reminder of how much some people hated being alive in the late 90s without a) resorting to faking having a good time, or b) not being alive anymore, it's pretty enjoyable.

Next

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho
Read more

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - Hit & Run Holiday

Image
I noticed today that the strange part of the world who actually knows about My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult has finally accepted that they are in fact "industrial disco." The history of Wax Trax and Chicago industrial music is a subject worthy of an entire library, but MLWTTK is my favorite band to emerge from those humble record store beginnings. They are an unpredictable band for sure, and i definitely don't like all of their albums, but Hit & Run Holiday is an album i think every human being on the planet should hear at least once. This album is simply impossible to describe, because it doesn't actually belong to a musical genre as we understand them. It's actually a movie. I know that sounds weird, but the band is actually a movie. My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult was the name of the movie they were trying to make, but composing the soundtrack led them so far afield that they just shrugged and kept going as a band instead. All of their albums come f
Read more

Eyrth - Meridian

Image
A terrible sadness accompanies the release of Meridian by Latvian Ambient Metal band EYRTH. Since their debut Fracture in early 2019 the band, and indeed the whole world has suffered a global pandemic, intense ideo-political turmoil, the death of friend and bandmate Igor Golovin, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  The war in Ukraine still wages on, even though we in the Western hemisphere seem to have largely forgotten. These are turbulent times, and Alex and Andrey are rightfully entering an extended break. We may not see or hear new music from them for a while, if ever, and that is completely understandable. The music they've created, however, is truly breathtaking. Self-described as "Uranium wreckage in audio," the music of Eyrth is every bit as hauntingly beautiful as it is brutally crushing. Close your eyes and you'll quickly find yourself in the achingly cold and desolate wasteland of human technological atrophy. Slow, ponderously heavy, at times rabidly ragi
Read more