Time Capsule: Neutral Milk Hotel, On Avery Island

Most debut albums are remembered for what they became. On Avery Island, instead, is remembered for what it didn’t. Released in 1996, two years before In the Aeroplane Over the Sea would swallow the indie rock ecosystem whole, Neutral Milk Hotel’s first record has long lived in the shadow of its own future. Even its defenders tend to speak about it apologetically: it’s the rough draft, the proof-of-concept, the lo-fi larva that would one day metamorphose into a cult classic. It’s a convenient narrative, but perhaps not an entirely fair one. Is Avery Island as good as Aeroplane? Of course not, and that’s less a knock on the former than a testament to the latter: Avery Island doesn’t measure up to Aeroplane, but that is because very few albums do. I’d even argue On Avery Island would likely be seen as one of the best records in any other band’s discography—but Neutral Milk Hotel isn’t any other band. They released two albums before disappearing into near total mystique and cult fervor: one very good album, and one album that revolutionized the entire future of alternative music. In hindsight, it’s easy to frame Avery Island as the trial run before the slam dunk, but that general dismissive perception—widespread enough to result in articles attempting to make sense of why it’s only ever seen as the “other” Neutral Milk Hotel record—misses something essential about what On Avery Island actually is: an album in its own right.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea may have garnered the tears and tattoos—and rightfully so; it’s seen as a masterpiece for a reason—but On Avery Island is the one that still feels like a live wire. It’s a record made not by a band (at the time, there was no band, only Jeff Mangum in a haunted closet with dreams of butterflies and a good friend in fellow Elephant 6 member Robert Schneider) but by a mind in motion: overwrought, overfeeling, under constraint. What it lacks in compositional clarity—which, I would argue, was likely Mangum’s intention, given his famous distaste for anything slick or telegraphed—it more than makes up for in a strange and searing vision, which, like the record itself, never resolves so much as collapses into catharsis.

There is no proper shape to On Avery Island. It’s not interested in symmetry or resolution. Built largely on four-track recordings then overdubbed with fuzzed-out bass, air organ, brass, and percussion all arranged under Robert Schneider’s expert direction, it’s a record of accretion: songs doubling back into themselves, movements bleeding into noise, lyrics half-buried in tape hiss. As Mangum himself described it years later, in what would become his final interview (at least to date), his creative process was often less about “writing” than about allowing fragments—of image, memory, dream—to congeal through intuitive improvisation, what he called “active imagination.” And Avery Island is an album made in just that space: not the dream itself, but the halfway-there place where dreams are still becoming, still glitching at the edges, still finding form. If Aeroplane expands into something transcendent, burgeoning beyond Mangum himself into an entire world made up of the annals of history and the imaginaries of a dream-state, Avery Island burrows deep into the immanent, the already-there, the borrowed houses and boiler rooms and pregnant friends and sexual escapades and stabbing griefs that made up the world of the man at its center.

What’s remarkable about On Avery Island is how it contains, in embryonic form, nearly everything that would come to define Jeff Mangum’s voice—and, crucially, how uninterested it seems in tidying any of it up. The record doesn’t have Aeroplane’s arc, its ache, its finality. What it has instead is disarray, a sense of psychic overflow. It is less a body than a fever dream of one: bloated, knotted, screeching, tender. The fidelity is often abysmal, the songs wander, the sequencing is jarring, and it ends in an extended psychedelic noise experiment that all but dares you to turn it off (and, if you play it for friends, will ensure you’re never granted aux cord privileges again. I may or may not be speaking from personal experience. In my defense, it was very funny). And yet it coheres, not in spite of those choices but because of them. The chaos is structural. That it barely holds together is exactly the point. If art aims to depict a world that’s falling apart at the seams, a mind careening between dreams and reality, why would we even want it to feel neat or tidy?

From the beginning, there’s a sense of contradiction at the heart of the record: On Avery Island is deeply intimate but also hermetically sealed, full of private iconography and half-legible emotional shorthand. Take “Song Against Sex,” which opens the record with a tangle of sound and surrealism so dense it nearly defies touch. The lyrics read like free association at first blush, yet, as Mangum later clarified in interviews, many of the images were rooted in personal sexual experiences—now rendered grotesque, theatrical, dreamlike. Even as it opens with the bizarre image of a zombified Christlike figure “kissing foreign fishes / that flew right out from his hands,” the song slowly sharpens into a strange sort of emotional (if not literal) clarity. At first the collage of psychic and (perhaps only semi-)fictional biographies feels inscrutable: love and sex in metaphorical apocalypse, deli markets with flower stands and “pretty girls and their burning men,” a relationship gone so sour the spurned party locks their partner inside the house and self-immolates on the lawn in the light of the early morning.

But in the midst of all these strange stories, Mangum finds purchase in the mundane and broken and real, dropping line after line that detonate like psychological bombs: see “When this life just gets so grating / All the grittiness of life / But don’t take those pills your boyfriend gave you / You’re too wonderful to die,” or “All the pleasure points attacking / All the looks of love were staged … / So why should I lie here naked / When it’s just too far away / From anything we could call loving – / Any love worth living for?” For all his perceived impenetrability, there is nothing but emotional lucidity in Mangum’s near-wail of “I’m always sober / Always aching / Always heading towards / Mass suicide.”

The song feels like it’s eating itself in real time, emotionally direct but lyrically elliptical, swinging between desire and annihilation, body and shame. There is no one mode, no single register. It’s angry, erotic, depressive, and drugless all at once—a burnout anthem for someone too squeamish to light the joint, too scared to take the pills, too perceptive to ignore what’s breaking down around him. What emerges is less a protest song than a manifestation of the confusion of living in a world that seems to fight against life itself. Mangum purposefully doesn’t resolve the contradictions, because they aren’t there to be resolved. They’re there to be heard.

This inner fracture—between knowing and not knowing, between the lyric and the illegible—is perhaps On Avery Island’s central aesthetic gesture. Nearly every song is built out of collision: melodic sweetness scorched by feedback, lyrical tenderness corroded by despair. The album’s second track, “You’ve Passed,” begins in mourning and never really leaves it. Mangum’s voice is heavy as he sings: “The lady is dying / She bends back like a wave / As her spirit is climbing / Through the hospital wall and away.” The sentiment is clear. The exact context (which is, for what it’s worth, that the track was written about Mangum’s late grandmother) doesn’t matter—comprehension isn’t the point. Feeling is. The emotional impulse is raw and uncluttered, the image plain in its devastation. He’s mourning someone he couldn’t reach in time, and maybe couldn’t fully know. It’s personal, and yet it goes beyond that, too: “Always in life,” he sings, again and again, “we all must make this mistake.” And we do: we lose ourselves in our individual lies and farces and fakes and in the process lose something worse—the chance to truly connect with someone before the end, before they start to fade.

The album flickers between death and life, eulogy and celebration, always two sides of the same coin. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which side we’re on, and that’s by design. “A Baby for Pree,” clocking in at just over a minute, feels almost like an afterthought on first listen—tucked in the tracklist, feather-light, eerie in tone. But it might be one of the record’s most viscerally unsettling songs. A portrait of childbirth rendered in bodily horror and delicate sound, it depicts a woman “with bees in her breath” whose babies “pour all across the bathroom floor.” The language is florid, grotesque, almost mythic in its surrealism, but the affect is intimate, even affectionate—there is no condemnation here, no editorializing. Instead, the narrator seems spellbound by the fact of life’s emergence, awestruck by its cost. It is not celebration, exactly, nor is it grief. It’s a stunned kind of reverence for the strange, biological brutality of creation—wet, loud, and full of consequence. Vulgar in its beauty, beautiful in its vulgarity.

That uncanny blend of tenderness and the unbearable is a Mangum signature. In “Three Peaches,” perhaps the record’s most explicitly mournful song—and, in this critic’s opinion, the single most devastating, hard-to-swallow track in Neutral Milk Hotel’s entire discography—we get the flipside: not birth, but survival. The track was reportedly written for a friend who had recently attempted suicide, and to be frank, speaking as someone who has lived through much the same, it’s a genuinely difficult listen for just how closely he captures not just the experience, but the ineffable feeling of it. The muted relief, the miserable terror, the inability to comprehend. The lyrics open with a blunt demand—“There is no dream, so wake up”—but slowly unfurl into something far more fragile and complex. “You’re in the bathroom carving holiday designs into yourself,” he sings, “Hoping no one will find you, but they found you / And they took you, and you somehow survived.”

There is no moral charge here: no anger at the attempt, no ecstasy at the failure. There is only a kind of shell-shocked recitation. Even the gratitude offered at the song’s end, while obviously genuine, is undercut by a bone-deep weariness. His repetition of “I’m so happy that you didn’t die” is drawling, raw, gravelly, as if pulled out of his gut by force, and never has a declaration of relief felt so much like a funeral dirge. This is a song for life, for the rare opportunity granted to keep living it, but at what cost? (Perhaps most gut-wrenching of all, the friend this song was written about did end up successfully taking her own life in 2005, nearly 20 years later.)