Neutral Milk Hotel at the Enmore 14/11/13 - Live Review

It is likely that if your dad was a university student in the nineties or if you are part of some obnoxious internet music forum, that you in turn care about Neutral Milk Hotel. Fifteen years since drifting off from each other (in between Jeff Mangum’s Hungarian folk exponents) they have come together again to reignite vivid imagery of sex, death and Anne Frank in those of us who were moved by it all in the first place. Thank God Harvest Festival was cancelled because we all fell back into our souls at the Enmore Theatre.

Rather, in a church of devotees; the low-fidelity-indie-rock band we had been waiting to see for our whole lives were in front of us feasibly. In this terribly bright and terribly warm lighting, even more divine: Mangum’s (now aged) hollow and reedy timbre swept through our anterior arteries, which when so swollen with nostalgia, found it difficult to process the triumphant trombones and trumpets and brass infested et cetera which - literally - sawed eerily away at our hearts, as our bodies drifted around in unison.

“How do you feel?” asked someone clinging to the barrier for dear life. “Physically I feel like shit but all this love is washing it away.” said Mangum.

Almost playing their sophomore album in full (par ‘Communist Daughter’) and borrowing the sweetest and darkest from their debut album/range of EPs, their set was sustained, yet completed in a fleeting moment. Dancing with, swaying next to, and putting arms around strangers was commonplace as tears were shed during the resplendent ‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’, a song as wistful as it is whimsical, “What a beautiful dream / That could flash on the screen / In the blink of an eye and be gone from me” A performance so very raw and real is rare and endlessly fulfilling to behold.

A surreal combination of euphoria and melancholy both felt at once is what Neutral Milk Hotel are capable of providing, and it is why we keep coming back to them. It is why they are as important as they were in 1998 (probably more important). Most music will make you feel something, triggering some kind of emotional response. But here, Neutral Milk Hotel have you feeling everything so much, to such an overwhelming extent, that all you can hope to do is feel blessed that you saw them with your own eyes.

Review by Jessica Syed

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