Neutral Milk Hotel Pieces of article by Phil McMullen
Neutral Milk Hotel isn't so much a band as a concept. The product of the singulary imaginative mind locked inside Jeff Mangum's head, it's been a band in the past and will be a band again, but at the same time it can just be Jeff and a few friends or even just Jeff and some odd bits of furniture with peculiar acoustic properties. The peripatetic Mr. Mangum has rarely stayed still long enough in the past three years to hold a stable line-up together anyway, and talking to him I came to realise that it's the extraordinary breadth of his experiences which are lending such a melancholy and dream-like quality to his songwriting. If great art is born of suffering then Neutral Milk Hotel is high art indeed; and if it ain't, then it still makes for wonderful pop music.
The first thing that strikes you about Neutral Milk Hotel is Jeff Mangum's voice. It is gruff, melancholy and yet at once strident and powerful. He can hold a note like nobody's business and, cleverly, uses his voice as an instrument in itself and not simply as an adjunct to the foreground instrumentation as most other artists might.
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