Neutral Milk Hotel* – Two-Headed Boy (Helen Chandler guest post)

This is such an intense 4 and a half minutes of a song. Jeff Mangum beats the acoustic guitar like it’s a percussion instrument and shout-sings the often mystifying lyrics and you feel like you could get drunk and sing along.

Two-Headed Boy reminds me of a time, a few years ago, when I seemed to want to shout it at the top of my lungs whenever I got drunk with my friends. I think they got sick of that pretty quickly.

Jeff Mangum played Whelan’s in Dublin earlier this year, after rescheduling from November 2011. I couldn’t make the new date, but I heard that he played this song and wished that I could have been there, whiskey in hand, enjoying its fierce intensity.

/HC

*Artist #563