Mother, Won't You Hear My Desperate Cries I'm Calling In?

I find it hard to make room for a band like Neutral Milk Hotel and a songwriter like Jeff Magnum anymore. I love In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, don't get me wrong. The record came out ten years ago this month, replete with magazine articles and blog entries about its legacy. I love it - but I can't listen to it anymore. It just aspires to be too much for my liking. I think it's that Jeff Magnum, the figure behind NMH, is just like too much of a fragile, abnormal, hard to relate with guy for me. I'm reading about him on Slate as I write this. "At home in the collective's base of Athens, Ga., or out on his peregrinations, Mangum cut a strange figure: a long-locked, intense-looking man with a gale-strength singing voice who liked to wear garish thrift-store sweaters and embellish the cuffs of his pants with cartoon sketchings." I can't listen to people like that because I don't think they would like me if they met me. I am nothing like that. I don't do anything that he does, so that kind of drives me away from his music. It did't initially, when I didn't know much about Magnum, just that he had a fucking knack for melody and clever songwriting. Then, the whole "Two-Headed Boy" movement got to me... all like, the "beautiful sadness" in those songs were way too much. I'd have to be feeling really self-serious to listen to that without cringing or skipping over it after a few seconds of play. This is someone who cried for days and almost blamed himself for what happened after reading Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl. I cry when I read lots of books, but it just feels weird to listen to someone like Magnum, unstable and always taking things to the extreme - like his near-silence since 1998.

His mysticism bothers me almost to a point of disgust. The same goes for people like Bob Dylan, Sam Beam (pre-Woman King), Morrissey, Brian Wilson, Panda Bear... my mind is blanking but there are more. I can listen to these people in doses sometimes, but the alienation their lives and music are centered on just alienates me. That music doesn't please me. What does is like, the opposite: music that is literally social. Stuart Murdoch's storytelling about the kids you know at prep-school in Belle and Sebastian, Broken Social Scene's communal approach to making music, punk bands like the Loved Ones that are writing for us, not to get rid of some crazy fucking demons.

And then of course, there's Los Campesinos!, lol, whose record I still can't get over. I've listened to Hold On Now, Youngster... way too much the last few days. It doesn't like speak strictly for me because it's not like I can relate to every single lyric on the record. But it's like the lives of several likeminded teenagers being played out in stereo. It's not just the lyrics either, they play music amazingly and like, it's clever; the parts where they decide to yell along a line with whoever is taking lead, the windy little synth parts in the album's midsection, the aural cacophony of their sound in general. Glockenspiel, distorted guitars, xylophone, violin, synth, drums that sound like they're about to be knocked over. Don't let me talk about this record any longer, talk about it yourselves! Ask me to burn it for you (it's not available stateside yet, but I'm a little pirate so...)! Hopefully, you won't regret it.

Unalienatedly yours,
Joe