Bold as Love

Younger bands that imitate this music usually sound awful, especially American kids trying to sing with Cockney accents. So check out the real deal here; unless you're lucky enough to find a copy of Cock Sparrer Live and Loud, this best-of record will do you just fine. (Adam Bregman)

NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL
In the Aeroplane Over the
Sea (Merge)

In what's sure to become a new hipster allusion, Neutral Milk Hotel leader Jeff Mangum bellows, "I love you, Jesus Chryyyst!" toward the start of his second album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. And even with nothing in his delivery to suggest anything other than pure religious devotion, it'd be easy to assume that Mangum couldn't possibly be making this statement from any point other than one of irony. Hey, it's supposed to be a given, considering the indie purebred (read: anti-mainstream, postmodern-cynical) context in which the man operates. His records are on the decidedly un-major, Superchunk-owned Merge label; he's part of the hip, insular Elephant 6 crowd; and when his band played Spaceland a couple of years back, one member wore the most ironic garb possible - a cardboard Burger King crown.

Despite all this, it's not hard to strip away the peripherals and let Mangum's music float on its own hearty strengths, both here and on 1995's graceful On Avery Island. Mangum's strong voice, dream-consciousness lyrics and guitar strumming are always mixed high enough to be Neutral Milk Hotel's runaway focus, putting him - despite the presence of three other bandmates and various other members of their rotating "recording collective" - squarely in the emotive singer-songwriter category, which he handles with aplomb and honesty. When Mangum's not soloing with Beatlesque melodic flair, he's assembling mini-orchestral Pied Piper marches, on which he flaunts his ever-increasing fondness for unlikely instruments such as "zanzithophone" and uilleann pipes, and he allows his players the free reign of fun self-expression and enthusiasm, even if their singing-saw skills are a bit rusty.

When Mangum sings of finding solace, and longing, and the discovery of self and others, it occasionally leans toward word salad - but his lyrics are disjointed like our hazy memories of childhood. And if those aren't irony-free, then what is? (Mara Schwartz)