Neutral Milk Hotel at The Tabernacle, Atlanta, October 26, 2013

It's both easy and hard to call any given show "Concert of the Year."  Easy in the excitement and rapture you experience as you're leaving the venue.  Hard, as in how can you compare, say, Savages at Vinyl with Yo La Tengo at the Buckhead Theater, or Blind Pilot at Centennial Olympic Park with Foxygen at 529?  However, given all these cautions and risks, Neutral Milk Hotel presented as strong a contender for Concert of the Year last night as one could possibly hope to hear.

Half Japanese opened. 

Photography, even with cell phones, was strictly forbidden at last night's show.  Although the crowd was big enough - the show was sold out - that I could easily have snuck in a few pictures, I decided to abide by the artists' request in the spirit of cooperation.  I found the Instagram picture above of Half Japanese on someone's Facebook page and since I never agreed not to share someone else's pics, there you go.  The Neutral Milk Hotel setlist at the top of the page isn't from last night's show (or even last night's sequence of songs), but the closest thing that I could find on Google.

But I digress.  The semi-legendary band Half Japanese opened with a full, hour-long set.  They are considered a punk rock band, but listening to them now just reminds me of how broad a range of music the term "punk" was applied to back in the late 70s and early 80s (sort of like "alternative" in the 90s or "indie" today).  Their music nowadays would probably be called "garage rock" or "lo-fi" rather than "punk,"  but then, who needs categories, anyway?  

Half Japanese are led by singer and "guitarist" Jad Fair. I put "guitarist" in quotes because Jad does not play guitar in any traditional manner, once stating "the only chord I know is the one that connects the guitar to the amp."  Instead, he banged and strummed on an untuned electric guitar, eventually breaking the neck off the guitar body and still continued to bend the strings and pull sound from the instrument before abandoning it all together.  

Half Japanese have been together for over 30 years now, although I vaguely recall seeing Fair perform solo once back in the late 80s in Albany, New York, of all places, but don't hold me to that - the memory's pretty vague. In any event, last night the band included longtime members, John Sluggett, Gilles Rieder, Mick Hobbs, and Jason Willett.  Highlights included no less than two separate songs about Frankenstein, a cover of Daniel Johnson's King Kong, and Fair's presence and sly sense of play throughout the set.

After a fairly long break between sets, Jeff Magnum took the stage solo, looking almost like the Unabomber with his long beard and hair.  His first words were to request that everybody put their cell phones away ("We want to play for you"), and then he launched into Oh Comely.  The audience was delirious - no one can cover Jeff Magnum like Jeff Magnum - and when the trumpeter came on stage for the horn portion of the song, they exploded in approval.

The band pulled out all the stops for this performance. For King of Carrot Flowers, the second song of the set, they had a three-member horn section, and at other times during the performance they had a s many as eight people on stage with them.  Band member Julien Koster (The Music Tapes) was as eclectic as ever, bowing a carpenter's saw, playing accordion, bass, a small Moog, or whatever the song required. 

It may not be possible at this point in time to define an "indie" sound, but whatever that sound may be, a strong argument can be made that Neutral Milk Hotel was the first to achieve it. One hallmark of what I consider the indie sound is the use of traditional acoustic instruments such as banjo and accordion, instruments usually associated with Amerciana music, but used in a non-traditional way to fill out the band's sound.  Neutral Milk Hotel have long been innovators in this, as well as the way that they use horns. You can still hear their influence today in the music of bands such as Arcade Fire, Beirut, and The Decemberists.

What was remarkable was how faithfully they captured the sound of the revered recorded versions of their songs, especially considering the 15 years that have passed since the release of In An Aeroplane Over the Sea.  Magnum's voice seems not to have aged at all, and not only did they have the rest of the original Aeroplane band members back together (Mangum, Koster, Scott Spillane, and Jeremy Barnes), but they apparently used the same expressive individual instruments as on the recordings (french and english horns, saws, bowed banjo, and so on).

The result was an entertaining, uplifting, and musically adventurous evening (as if we expected anything less).  The band played a full hour and then returned for a three-song encore.  After King of Carrot Flowers I forgot the sequence of songs, but they included Two-Headed Boy, Holland 1945, and Everything Is, as well as unrecorded songs like Ferris Wheel On Fire (appropriate for The Tabernacle, situated as it is next to Atlanta's new ferris wheel); in short, everything one could have hoped for.

I don't think anyone left unsatisfied, and as we walked out, I heard many people wondering if they'd be able to get back in tonight (Saturday was the first of a sold-out, two-night stand).  In you were a fan of NMH, the evening was everything you could have wanted, and I'm sure that if you hadn't have heard them before, you would have left a fan last night.

It was a wonderful, perfect set, lacking nothing.  Concert of the Year.