Neutral Milk Hotel has eked out a strange nook for itself in the annals of music history. And while In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has become a rite of passage at this point, their other albums have sort of fallen by the wayside. And by other albums, I mean two EPs and their first, On Avery Island.
Avery Island is real: A salt dome in southern Louisiana, which the makers of Tabasco sauce call home. An odd thought when you consider On Avery Island’s cover: a hand painted photo of seaside carousels, framed by a lurid vermillion and cutouts of the band’s name and album title.
In Jeff Mangum’s vision, Avery Island becomes a fantastic, fuzzy place full of surreal scenes and unseemly phantasmagoria, where everything swelters and macerates. It clings to you, almost grotesquely, full of salt and stench.
This is evident when you read the lyrics. Consider the opening lines of “A Baby for Pree”: ‘Blistering Pree, all smiling and swollen / Makes babies to breathe / With their hearts hanging open all over the sheets.” Or consider the closing lines of “Song Against Sex”: “And when I wake up in the morning / I won’t forget to lock the door / Because with a match that’s mean and some gasoline / You won’t see me any mo-ho-ho-ooore!”
The narrators and characters in these songs duck in and out of sight under the blanket of Magnam’s sweltering, macerating music—by turns carnivalesque and moisture-bitten decrepitude. Horns, fuzzed out guitars and Magnam’s high-register waver are the aural mainstays.
On Avery Island is also graced with several instrumentals, including its most carnivalesque track, “Avery Island/April 1st” as well as the almost 14 minute drone collage/suite “Pree-Sisters Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye.”
On the surface, all this amounts to an alienating experience. And On Avery Island is unsettling. But there’s a tenderness that belies the strangeness. On “Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone,” Magnum implores, “Follow me through a city of frost covered angels / I swear I have nothing to prove / I just want to dance in your tangles / To give me some reason to move.” And on “Where You’ll Find Me Now,” he laments, “I let you down / And swollen and small is where you’ll find me now.”
Rating: A-
