7 Most Creepy Weirdo Lyrics From Neutral Milk Hotel

There’s something about being 16, when you think you’re the only person who’s ever heard music, when you’re discussing the merits of PJ Harvey while smoking cigarettes at the park near school, when you’re into dudes who you suspect take acid and write depressive poetry on their walls in the dark with a Sharpie clutched in their fist, and who speak in misanthropic riddles you swoon at cluelessly at parties, and who seem to have been wearing the same pair of jeans forever and haven’t washed their hair for about that long, too.

This is about the same time you fall deeply in love with the speaking-just-to-you poetry of Sylvia Plath and Neutral Milk Hotel; when you walk around with your Discman or chunky-ass original-series iPod eschewing the genius of grotesquery and singers who “don’t give a fuck if they sound ugly”, and whose songs boys tell you you do a moving cover of even though you know you sound like a total dork.

For these, and many more reasons, I was struck by fan-girl-grade excitement when I read that the patron saints of the weirdo-indie lo fi genre are reuniting for a series of shows – and that they’ve allegedly locked in an Australian tour with a promoter that isn’t Harvest/Soundwave’s AJ Maddah:

But here’s the thing: most of us are no longer sixteen. Are we still so easily convinced by their enjambment of morbid metaphors told through nauseating, visceral adjectives sung throatily over sparse guitar? Probably, yes.

To celebrate, here’s a collection of Neutral Milk Hotel’s most bizarre lyrical moments — which especially excel out of context.

7: ‘Sailing Through’, Beauty (demo)

I really wanted to be in your body

Into the toilet with our faces removed

The thing about Jeff Mangum’s lyrics is that everyone wants to say that they understand them, that they feel a deep affinity with his pain/insight/worldview, but honestly, even though I enjoy the exquisite pain of it all, I’m not convinced I know what he’s actually talking about a lot of the time. This reads like the world’s worst regretful morning after text, ever.

6: ‘Two Headed Boy Pt II’, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Like your boy used to be, long ago,

Wrapped in sheets warm and wet

Sounds like the kid needs those plastic sheets your grandma used to put on when you slept over.

 

5: ‘Holland, 1945’, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

And here is the room where your brothers were born

Indentions in the sheets

Where their bodies once moved but don’t move anymore

Let’s not let all of Mangum’s terrifying imagery of cot-death or whatever he’s talking about get in the way of the fact that he’s such a cool guy that he doesn’t even need to use real words. Apparently he meant ‘indentations’ but said it wrong, so they decided to keep it. Not surprising coming from the dude who recorded the inimitable epic ‘Oh Comely’ in one take (which is why you can hear the producer yell “Holy shit!” faintly in the background at the end of the track).

 

4: ‘Pree Sisters Swallowing a Donkey Eye’, On Avery Island

The instrumental closing track of On Avery Island has a title so batshit it doesn’t even need lyrics. A disturbing name to sign off most of the world’s introduction to a deeply affecting band.

 

3: ‘The King of Carrot Flowers pts 2 & 3’, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

I will shout until they know what I mean

I mean the marriage of a dead dog sing

Oh, yeah. No, no, I’ve got this. I totally know what you mean.

 

2: ‘The King of Carrot Flowers pts 2 & 3’, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

I love you Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ I love you

Yes I do

This would scare the shit out of me every time it came on, not just because of what he sings (I think even Jesus would be creeped out), but because of how freaking LOUD he sings it. I’m still unsuccessful at resisting the urge to skip the song when it comes on.

 

1: ‘Oh Comely’, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Your father made fetuses with flesh licking ladies,

While you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park. …

All of them milking with green fleshy flowers,

While powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines.

Smelling of semen all under the garden

Was all you were needing when you still believed in me.

The weirdest (who even says semen in a song?) lyrics IMO happen to appear in my favourite Neutral Milk Hotel verse, in my favourite Neutral Milk Hotel song. This song it so good it’s exhausting. Also it would be amazing/weird/hilarious to hear thousands of people chanting the lyrics at once while the band’s playing live – something we look forward to seeing on YouTube. As if you’re going to be okay with going back to listening to like Snoop Lion or whatever you had on a minute ago after this.

So, Mangum proves that most of the time if you’re going to be brilliant, you need to be a little bit scary and more than a little bit nuts. And hey, die-hard fans, don’t get all pissed! The above is a friendly poke at one of my all-time-favourite bands (who I can no longer listen to on the reg because I don’t ever want to need prescription uppers, thanks). Here’s hoping that early next year we’ll get to see all the 31-year-olds in their holey Sparklehorse t-shirts tear themselves away from the glow of their RSS feed, rub their eyes and revel in the angst they used to indulge daily but no longer have time for, reverently murmuring about the first time they heard On Avery Island and how much it tore them a new one. Girls (and boys) will swoon for at least another two decades.