Jeff Mangum's Coming to Town

In the world of indie rock, Neutral Milk Hotel leader Jeff Mangum is a bit like the Wizard of Oz: a man who, thanks to his reclusive ways, is treated with a mythical, almost supernatural reverence.

I can't help but be sucked in by the enigma of Mangum. After all, I wasn't introduced to Neutral Milk Hotel until around 2004, by which time the songwriter had already been absent from the music business for several years. His band's defining work, the cultishly adored fuzz-folk opus In the Aeroplane over the Sea, had come out back in 1998, but rather than revel in its relative success, he had disappeared and no one seemed to know where the hell he was.

A Neutral Milk Hotel-loving friend informed me that Mangum was creating tape loops and had released a collection of field recordings of Bulgarian folk music (2001's Orange Twin Field Works: Volume I). Was he uncomfortable being in the spotlight? Had he lost his creative spark after Aeroplane? A rare 2002 interview with Pitchfork hinted at crippling self-doubt and a personal crisis of existential proportions. It seemed like his career was over.

Making the puzzle all the more intriguing was the music itself, since In the Aeroplane over the Sea is a peculiarly brilliant collection that surely ranks among the strangest and most impassioned concept albums ever. Many of the songs are loosely based on the life and death of Anne Frank, and Mangum sings mournful tributes to the late diarist in a high, often gratingly nasal whine. Some of these tracks suggest a quasi-romantic obsession with Frank; the standout song "Holland, 1945" calls her "the only girl I've ever loved," while the aching title tune is a dream-like romp in which the narrator imagines "Anna's ghost all around," and hears her voice "rolling and ringing through me / Soft and sweet."

When he isn't singing overtly about Frank, Mangum's words paint a series of surreal and unsettling pictures, from "holy rattlesnakes that fell all 'round your feet" to "flesh-licking ladies," to semen that "stains the mountaintops." These are paired with musical arrangements that careen between barebones acoustic folk, speaker-blown fuzz rock and blaring brass. There's even a ferociously distorted bagpipe freakout.

Depending on who you ask, the songs are either utterly brilliant or totally unpalatable. No wonder the band couldn't last, I figured, since Aeroplane was a one-of-a-kind stroke of genius that could never be recreated.

I was more surprised than anyone when, in 2011, Mangum announced that he would be making a comeback of sorts. He has since been touring as a solo act, playing all the old classics during intimate live shows around the world. This month (July 25), that tour will bring him to Vancouver.

I'll be in the audience at the Vogue Theatre, as eager as anyone to see what the wizard is really like once the curtain is pulled back.