Concert Review: Jeff Mangum at the Lincoln Theatre

Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. Jeff Mangum (right) is on tour for the first time since 1998.by Charlie Pfeifer, 1L

Few experiences are so indescribably wonderful as seeing the favorite artist in your iTunes library who was “retired,” in concert. In 1998 after writing his indie-rock opus “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” Jeff Mangum was a peerless songwriter, poet, and generation-defining voice. The Georgian singer and guitarist was the big fish at the mid to late nineties Elephant Six collective, a group of musicians situated outside of the college town Athens, Georgia.

Mangum was already the dominant force within Elephant Six when his band, Neutral Milk Hotel released their second LP. Their first effort, “On Avery Island”, had come out to positive if muted reviews in 1996; they seemed content to reside in semi-obscurity of the nineties college rock scene. The band started touring after the release of “Aeroplane” but to Mangum’s astonishment, the crowds obsessively sung the songs, rife with nostalgia and wit, back at him. The reclusive front man toured for several months before withdrawing from a public that had begun to adore him. He disbanded Neutral Milk Hotel and spent the next decade dodging a listenership that, as the years passed, grew larger and larger until it became almost cultish.

From 1998 to 2010, Mangum would perform six songs, in total, onstage.

In December, in the middle of cramming for exams, I purchased a ticket to U Street’s historic Lincoln Theatre on Ticketmaster 90 seconds after the sale opened. A friend of mine in Hotung attempted to buy the ticket a minute later but the show was sold out.

In the years since “Aeroplane” was first released, it had become canonical. It is available in most Brooklyn basement apartments and music blogger’s recently played on Spotify.

The private Mangum had initially been appalled with the outpouring of support for his songs, often drowned out in the small venues the band played after the album’s release. Now, twelve years after “Aeroplane” came out, Mangum is playing to sold out theatres across the country. The person sitting next to me in the balcony was (appropriately) a middle aged lawyer at a small antitrust boutique. The crowd was a diverse mixture of flannel, aging hipsters, college newspaper writers, and skinny jean wearing teenagers.

From the first rapturous moment of “Two Headed Boy (Part 2),” Mangum’s acoustic lament narrated from the perspective of a conjoined twin briefly alluded to in H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Doctor Moreau,” he controlled the crowd. A decade later, the shy singer urges his audience to sing along, “like I know you all do at home,” he chuckled.

Mangum worked through most of both his albums onstage alone with his guitar, briefly joined by violins and an accordion to help recreate some of “Aeroplane’s” Eastern European pop influence. Think of Beirut’s horns and countless indie rock singers’ raspy croons in the last ten years, a tribute to Mangum’s definitive style, and you can begin to imagine his stage presence.

Ironically, the hushed crowd seemed as if they were afraid to sing now, straining to hear the lone guitarist before them, glad that after a decade away, Mangum returned to the spotlight.