Last week’s discussion of religion and its place in art (On a Mission from God) and the resulting conversation about Jeff Mangum has had me listening to a lot of Neutral Milk Hotel the past few days. While trying to uncover exactly what Mangum is up to these days (still searching), I stumbled across a tribute album to NMH, Each Song A Little More Than We Could Dare To Try.
I must admit that I have a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with tribute albums because more often than not they are sprawling, discordant catastrophes, that barely serve the original material.
Why does this happen? Well, the other day I was talking with a friend of mine who plays in a number of bands and he told me about a tribute album to The Birthday Party he worked on. He and the band were already recording in the studio when they were asked to record a track for Release the Bats (due out April 4th on Three One G). They listened to the original once, parsed out the different parts of the song, and then recorded it in one take. I’m not implying that everyone takes this approach when recording for a tribute album, but it wouldn’t surprise me based on the usual results.
But Tribute albums can, on the very rarest of occasions, not only serve the source material, but also offer new insight into the songs. Such is the case , I believe, with Each Song A Little More Than We Could Dare To Try.
Recorded in 2003 by a group of Neutral Milk Hotel fans from the message board on the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang, the album is an affectionate song-by-song reconstruction of Mangum’s acclaimed In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The original album is like a drive up the coast of Northern California on a beautiful, clear day when you feel like you can see all the way across the Pacific to Japan. But then the fog rolls 
in and you have absolutely no idea where you’re headed, much less whether you are about to drive off a cliff into the ocean. Each Song is far from being a polished portrait, but it does expand these moments of lucidity and ambiguity. The end result feels like the end of Wim Wenders’ rambling, cyberpunk epic Until the End of the World, a waking dream.
You can download the individual tracks from San Diego Serenade, or download a zip file of the album from RapidShare.
Hey man,
I’m glad you liked the tracks, I got your comment but was out of town for a while. I agree that tribute albums can so often be a horrific affair, and your friends experience lends a good deal of vision as to why this may be the case. I think that if you were going to do a tribute to NMH, this would be the only way to do it: unknown artists and not ever actually release the album. Anything more than that may have proven devastating. Keep up the good work on the blog,
-C