Idolator
Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum Gets Together With His Old Pals
While I was on a Brooklyn pier watching aerialists and Franz Ferdinand and the beginning of Indie Rock Celebrity Bumpwatching 2008 (sigh) on Saturday night, New York's Knitting Factory was playing host to the Holiday Surprise tour, on which various members of the Elephant 6 collective—including Julian Koster of the Music Tapes/Chocolate USA, Will Hart and Eric Harris of Olivia Tremor Control, and Scott Spillane of seemingly every Elephant 6 band's brass section (as well as the Gerbils)—performed the songs that made me wear down many a CD back in the day. And wouldn't you know it, Jeff Mangum, of Neutral Milk Hotel and an increasingly large legend thanks to the now 10-years-old In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, also showed up to lend his voice to a few of the evening's performances: The opening track to the Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk At Cubist Castle, "The Opera House," is above, and after the jump, a clip of the evening's performance of "I Have Been Floated." More »
Our 2008 Bonnaroo correspondent EJ Friedman sends along a note on Kanye West's set, which was hastily rescheduled to 2:45 a.m. Saturday/Sunday and didn't get going until the break of dawn: Nothing wrong with Kanye West's ego being the size of Jupiter, but his "glow-in-the-dark spectacular" was short on spectacle, long on wait, and not at all what was promised. Was it because Pearl Jam ran late? Was it because of a disagreement over the safety of some portion of his set? Was it because Kanye's over-inflated sense of self has crashed headlong into his limitations as a human being?
