Cult-rock fun that won’t spoil
Neutral Milk Hotel’s loud, brassy sound will arrive in SoFla near end of band’s reunion tour.
Neutral Milk Hotel, Jeff Mangum’s 1990s cult rock band that reunited in 2013 after spending more than a decade in hibernation, will showcase their loud, brassy poetry once more Wednesday, at the Olympia Theater at Gusman Center in Miami.
The sold-out show arrives near the end of a reunion tour that started in 2013 and will end in June, and will bear material from the band’s two albums, 1996’s “On Avery Island” and 1998’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” Mangum reunited his original “Avery Island” lineup for the tour, which includes Scott Spillane on horns, Jeremy Barnes on drums and multi-instrumentalist Julian Koster.
Mangum took his Athens, Ga., band on hiatus a year after the release of “Aeroplane,” a psychedelic folk-pop excursion that ponders sex, death, war and “The Diary of Anne Frank.” The experimental album still holds up as a clash of accordion, brass, organ and fuzzed-out guitars. The lyrics, sometimes arcane but begging to be decoded, carry what one New York Times review last year called “among the best run-on sentences in rock songwriting.”
The band has carved a lasting legacy, influencing Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler, whose band signed to Merge Records because it had also signed Neutral Milk Hotel. Last December, Neutral Milk Hotel’s music played in the credits of the final episode of “The Colbert Report.”
The band’s 1998 single “Holland, 1945,” a shotgun blast of horns, drums and sad recollections from a family coping with the wartime deaths of siblings, resonated with Colbert, who lost two brothers and his father in a plane crash when he was 10. The closing lines of the song are full of lament: “And here’s where your mother sleeps/ And here is the room where your brothers were born/Indentions in the sheets/Where their bodies once moved but don’t move anymore.”
Neutral Milk Hotel will perform 8 p.m. Wednesday, at the Olympia Theater at Gusman Center, 174 E. Flagler St., in Miami. Tickets can be had via third-party retailers. Call 305-374-2444 or go to OlympiaTheater.org.