Neutral Milk Hotel | Fresh Meat

Unless you've been in a coma for the last 72 hours, you probably know that our long-running national nightmare is now over...that's right we have fresh material from Neutral Milk Hotel.

I don't fully understand the story but it appears that a lady named Shannon Palmer, who lived in a house where Jeff Mangum had previously lived and which had been the birthplace of Elephant 6, discovered six unreleased Neutral Milk Hotel songs on an old mix tape she had been holding onto over the last decade. Huh?

Apparently, the recent death of friend inspired her to go back over a bunch of tapes from that period of her life. It was during that day of reminiscing that she realized that she had been sitting on these songs all of these years.

Was Mangum that flippant with his recordings that he would just forget about them as he moved from house to house? Does this mean there are more recordings floating around? Why did it take all of these years for Shannon to listen to the tape to hear what was on it? If I had a tape that I had gotten when living in a house associated with Neutral Milk Hotel, I would have been scouring that tape everyday. What other tapes does she have? It's either an amazing chapter in rock history or there is more to the story.

Regardless, Shannon has been very kind and made all six songs available for the masses to download. You can get three of the songs from Shannon's blog and then one each from You Ain't No Picasso, My Old Kentucky Blog and Neutral Milk Hotel's site.

My favorite of the six is "Now I'm Going Down" from Shannon's blog. The sound quality on some of them is pretty rough; similar to the sound quality on the Hype City Soundtrack and Everything Is EP.