Just announced, Neutral Milk Hotel coming to the Mann Center July 21st! Tickets go on sale Friday at noon.
PREVIOUSLY: In 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel released an album of hallucinatory folk-rock called In The Aeroplane Over The Sea that is, it can be said without fear of exaggeration, nothing short of a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Like My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, it is lightning caught in a bottle, one of those rare perfect albums that come along maybe once a decade. Or once a lifetime. In 1999, Jeff Mangum — Neutral Milk’s singer, songwriter and primary guitarist — disappeared from public life without explanation, declining all entreaties to perform or discuss the album or record a follow-up. Over the course of his decade-long Salinger-like hermitage, succeeding generations of Holden Caulfield-types have discovered and come to revere the album, and as such it has become something like The Catcher In The Rye of indie-rock. Four years ago Mangum emerged from seclusion and started performing again, refusing to offer any explanation for his mysterious disappearance or sudden return. After two solo tours came the announcement last summer that Mangum would be reuniting the original band for a world tour that sold out in minutes. MORE