Indie rock hangs on heroically for dear life

Check out In the Aeroplane Over the Sea sound clips at
The Planet of Sound.

By Alec Bemis

"Classical," she said. Not Brahms, not Bach, not Beethoven, just classical.

I have a theory that when an entire sub-category of musical production can be reduced to a genre name, without reference to artists, composers, or what have you--when that simple name can paint a perfect picture--it must be pretty much dead. Not deceased quite, but moribund. My friend, of course, was not listening to John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, or even Philip Glass. She was listening to classical(TM): soaring violins, inspirational, the three B's. She might also have been listening to techno(TM) or disco(TM) or even ska(TM), perhaps. Classical is only the oldest of many such genres.

Well, in the past four years or so I've listened to a lot of something called "indie rock," a genre which I've been pretty damn sure is gasping its final breaths. A few prize-winning mainstream hits might be squeezed out of the corpse, but the genre is basically a sad cliché: college kids, amateur quality playing, lo-fi recording, minimal expectations, angst, shitty jobs, bad haircuts.

I thought listening to the new album, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel--a.k.a. a guy named Jeff Mangum and a couple friends recording on a four-track--would be the perfect test case to check for indie rock's pulse. The mix, current day indie rock production and a sonic aesthetic redolent of the '60s, is, in conception, a terminal one. The group seems designed to be a sad case.

But somehow they're not. When Mangum starts singing "I love you Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ I love you yes I do," on "The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. Two," you are struck. You are struck by the earnestness, the way the Salvation Army brass in the background sweeps you along, the way one-note accordion drones and radio static and things called zanzithophones and singing saws become Mangum's own indie rock orchestra, the love of which Mangum terms "the belief that all things seem to contain a white light within them that I see as eternal."

And then he keeps going: about "the only girl he's ever loved," about Anne Frank's loneliness, about two-headed boys, about people dying and being saved, and he's-not-even-but-maybe-he-is-a-Jesus-freak-I-just-don't-know. He keeps bursting with a voice that doesn't have a right to be singing anything at all. He keeps playing with a shambolic, tripping-over-itself lack of poise. He keeps ranting about semen-stained mountain tops and little boys in Spain playing pianos filled with flames. He keeps making me dance when I hear this record and it's totally embarrassing. I keep loving what I'm listening to.

I want to call Jeff Mangum and say, "Jeff, what's with this doomed prophet game? Indie rock is dead." I think he would tell me he's been listening to dreams and visions and that rock 'n' roll hasn't given up the ghost. (Merge Records)

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