"Oh Comely"

Neutral Milk Hotel
(Merge, 1996)

Jeff Mangum picks up an acoustic guitar, opens his mouth, and sets a new standard for what's possible with three chords and an overactive imagination. He seems to belt it out -- all eight minutes of it -- in one long breath, this tantric odyssey of folksy psychedelia and Sephardic majesty, a "bright and bubbly, terrible dream" about reproduction and memory, music and death and Siamese twins freezing in a forest. It has the feel of the impossible, the Biblical, as if post-motorcycle-crash Dylan had scored Fanny and Alexander: surreal and exquisitely phrased, beautiful and ludicrous. And quite possibly just plain crazy.

-- Carly Carioli