Talk:Neutral Milk Hotel/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Bilorv (talk · contribs) 00:41, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Should be a pleasure to learn more about the band behind In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The references section looks excellent and I see the article is drawing from the hard work done on the Aeroplane article (or vice versa). Coverage looks sufficiently broad for GA. I'm aiming to make the majority of comments by the end of the week. — Bilorv (talk) 00:41, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Comments

Strike through or reply to as you want. These are all my comments, roughly by section but some might be out of order or misplaced. If you disagree with any, let me know what your thoughts are.

Infobox

• Infobox: "Labels" – Domino and Fire aren't mentioned in prose, but they should be even if it's just a change "was released" to "was released by X" or "was released on X's roster" or whatever.
• While we're talking about labels, I was confused by what Elephant 6 was until reading Elephant 6, whereas it should be clear if you read this article standalone. It's first mentioned with "... would eventually lead to the formation of the Elephant 6 music collective" and next with "where a large group of Elephant 6 musicians were living". Somewhere, NMH's creation of and involvement within Elephant 6 should be covered under "History". How did the collective get new groups involved (NMH members working in other bands, touring together or just involvement in the same genres)? How did it come to be that lots of the people were based in Athens?

So NMH wasn't the direct start of Elephant 6, it was just one of the three originating bands from the collective. The reason NMH was considered an Elephant 6 band was because of Mangum's association and because the Elephant 6 logo was affixed to the albums. As for why Athens became a hub city, well it seems to have been coincidence. Cooper notes in her book how Athens just so happened to be the center for the collective, like how grunge seemingly exploded in the Seattle area.

• Infobox: "Associated acts" – Every act added to this list dilutes the important information. Just limit it to the ones which members of NMH were really involved with: those look like The Apples in Stereo, The Music Tapes, The Gerbils, and A Hawk and a Hacksaw. If not, pick three or four of the most significant acts and make sure they're mentioned in the article prose.

History

• I think "t-shirt" should have a capital "T".
• After learning that Mangum released "Everything Is", a song that McPherson loved – I was confused when I read this whether McPherson already loved the song, or listened to it and loved it. The source presents it a bit differently: I told him that I had been trying to get in touch with him because I was really into [...] "Everything Is". I think we should reword to make it clear that McPherson was already interested in meeting the person behind "Everything Is".
• legal agreement ... legal representative – Repetitive, so the first "legal" can be omitted.
• another song "Ruby Bulbs" – needs commas or dashes.
• It's good to have these critics' opinions inline, but it's better to paraphrase and combine where possible, and use only the snippets you need to convey the critics' overall reception. I'd recommend: ... positive reviews from critics, who characterised the music as lo-fi pop. Kurt Wolff of the Houston Chronicle described listening to the music as "a trippy experience", finding it "a fresh exciting standout". The British publication NME wrote: "..."
• Pazz & Jop poll – Probably worth saying "The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll", as I recognise TVV but not the poll name.
• These initial projections were correct, as the album sold moderately well for the first few months – Any numbers? I'd like a comparison to the 5000 of Avery Island if possible. I notice the discography has a source for ~400,000 sales, presumably as of recently, which I think is worth mentioning somewhere (perhaps alongside the 140K figure).

So the highest number I could find from a reliable source was 393,000. But since the sentence you mention is in relation to the history section, I tried to keep it inline with the initial sales, which sadly I could not find an exact number for. I mention the 140,000 copies in the roughly the same corresponding section.

I see. Can we mention 393,000 in Legacy then? — Bilorv (talk) 11:14, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

• In the Aeroplane Over the Sea received positive reviews from critics – This isn't what the source says, really. AVClub summarise reception as: decent, plainspoken reviews ... distant praise, hedged bets, avoiding the heart at all cost. This matches what the Aeroplane article says in both lead and body as well.

How does it look now?

Yep, that's better. — Bilorv (talk) 11:14, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

• to afford the band members to move to Athens – Think this would be more natural as for the band members to afford to move to Athens.
• Ironically enough – I'm not sure that this technically is irony. The sentence would work without these words.
• became common fixtures on online message boards – This is the only coverage issue I have. I want to know more about this, and this must be the right article for it. I want to know names/details about the message boards and the rough time period over which this happened, at least. When the Aeroplane tour began and ended would be good to spell out in the appropriate History sections. Ideally I'd like a little more about the kind of tone of the message board content, or how news spread.

So unfortunately, there really isn't a better answer than just general message boards. The source I use states "Unintentionally, they timed their disbandment with the rise of music-forum discussions, Pitchfork's holy grail perfect-score verdicts and the internet's tendency to give hearsay a bigger platform than concrete facts." I'd assume these early discussions took place on something like Usenet, but I can't find any source that delves into this period in greater detail.

Now with that said, Cooper does mention in her book a number of Neutral Milk Hotel fansites that cater to really passionate fans, but she notes that these websites were formed in the mid-2000s, well after the band's breakup. This is the closest amount of detail I can find on the subject. There is also BLZ's incredibly detailed history lesson about the band's rise to cult status, which may answer some of your questions. Unfortunately it is original research.

Okay, thanks for the detailed reply on this one. There isn't a coverage issue if there aren't good enough sources with more detail, but I do find this background interesting. — Bilorv (talk) 11:14, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

• having to constantly explain his lyrics – To journalists or fans?

Artistry

• best and most fully developed album – Well, there's only two of them. Would the statement still be true if we replaced "album" with "work"/"release"?
• The musical tempo sometimes abruptly shift from track to track – I can't find this in the Rolling Stone source it's cited to.

Replaced with a source that describes the tempo and expanded upon the tempo statement just a little

• In the DeVille quote, I think everyone bashing away with such rudimental force that the songs seemed ready to topple over at any moment can be cut – "haphazard grace" is plenty to convey DeVille's point here.
• forming a tribute band – Plural for consistency.
• Mangum resurfaced in 2010 with a few solo shows – What did he play? NMH stuff or solo stuff? Whichever, specify in the article as much as possible.

The source doesn't say, although it's safe to assume it's mostly NMH stuff. Mangum doesn't really have a lot of publicly available songs that weren't recorded for NMH.

• Richardson says the imagery presented in In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is written with childlike wonder, in which mundane interactions are illustrated as fantastical moments – I think we can cut the description after "childlike wonder", but this comment reminded me of the significance of Anne Frank, which I think surely warrants a mention (maybe describing the range of critics' interpretations of how much of Aeroplane is about Frank).

Expanded on the Anne Frank connection.

• The equipment used onstage was cheap and broken – "Broken" how exactly? Not beyond usable, I guess. Or broken and so it produced a different lo-fi sort of sound?

Surprisingly yes, sometimes the equipment was just straight up broken! This was probably because the band members were usually high before going into a concert so when they were moving equipment, they were prone to drop it. With that said though, more often than not it was just cheap and of poor quality, which I changed to fit in accordance with the source.

Legacy onwards

• Among the more notable groups influenced – Per WP:NOTED, we can just say "Groups influenced include". As for the longer list of groups, I checked the Kesha source and the NMH influence is really cherry-picked here, a mention among dozens (hundreds?) of artists mentioned on her MySpace in 2008 is trivia rather than important music history. I suggest going through the other sources and leaving in only groups who would list NMH almost immediately if you asked them about their influences – I'll check the ones that remain and see what I think of them.

So I agree with you on the Kesha thing. Another user comes around this article every now and again and drops in a new band/singer that was influenced by Neutral Milk Hotel, and while most of the additions directly state Neutral Milk Hotel was a major influence for them, the Kesha one doesn't.

There are some other influences issues:

• The article also says Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler also said In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was the primary reason the band signed with Merge Records. The source says: Merge was a label that, I don't know... I don't listen to indie rock very much, but one of them I like is the Magnetic Fields. Their songs are as good as any other good songs, independent label or not. I feel the same way about that Neutral Milk Hotel record, you know? It's as good as anything. And there's other stuff on Merge that I felt that way about, too, and so that was really attractive to me. I notice that DeVille 2018 also says [Arcade Fire] signed to Merge partly because of their devotion to Aeroplane, but just cites the previous source for this. So definitely "primary reason" is not correct. "One reason" or "a contributing factor" is the most we could say, but omitting the sentence fully would be fine too as Arcade Fire are already given a fair bit of weight in the previous sentence.
• as well as singers Dan Snaith, Tim Kasher — The source has both talking about Aeroplane but neither actually saying that NMH were an influence on their own music (particularly dubious in the case of Kasher).
• Amanda Palmer — Source doesn't say anything about influence. That record was always really important to us is not such a statement.

— Bilorv (talk) 11:14, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

• I know this might be an annoying one, but I'd like some sources for "Members" in regards to the instruments that each person played. Liner notes from albums/releases would work, for instance.
• Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Music#Discographies, I think we need all their releases (there's not too many) mentioned in discography, separated by type.

Lead

• In the lead, I think it's worth explaining "lo-fi" as it's not hard to describe but it's a bit of a technical term. I'd also like a mention that the band use unusual instruments.

How does it look now?

Much better, thanks. — Bilorv (talk) 11:14, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

• In the lead, "and as one of" should be "and one of", I think (as in "Several music outlets ... called In the Aeroplane Over the Sea ... one of the ...").
• The infobox image can be cropped at the top and bottom to leave just the bit with the band, I think. However, it'll still be quite small in the infobox because it's very wide. I wonder if File:Neutral Milk Hotel live at Celebrate Brooklyn.PNG would be good for the infobox and then we could optionally use the current infobox image in the body, maybe at the top of a section (e.g. "Live performances") above the text, so it can take up more width. (If this were FA, I might ask you to look at Flickr or another source of CC-compatible images because I bet there's more images of the band performing out there.)

Replaced the lede image with the one you suggested. As for other photos, unfortunately I can't seem to find any other free photos online. If I ever do try and bring this to FAC, I'll try my hand at convincing someone to freely licence their photo, but for now I think it's fine.

Yep, absolutely fine for now. — Bilorv (talk) 11:14, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

Overall

Other than the above, I've got no issues with breadth or prose. No neutrality or stability issues. Good use of free images and the timeline for members' tenures. I'll be doing a bit more spotchecking of the sources which I can access, as most spotchecks were fine but a couple of the points above were raised from finding prose that doesn't quite match the sources. Formally, putting this  On hold, but as long as there's meaningful progress within a week I'll be happy to continue. — Bilorv (talk) 20:16, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

@Bilorv: Hi there! Thank you for taking up the review. I'll be a bit preoccupied for the next few days but I should be able to address these issues sometime this week. Famous Hobo (talk) 10:20, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

@Famous Hobo: No worries. Happy to be flexible if you're busy, as long as you keep me updated. — Bilorv (talk) 15:34, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

@Famous Hobo: the changes and comments so far look good—any timeline on crossing off the rest of the comments? — Bilorv (talk) 22:18, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

@Famous Hobo: I will give this one more week, but after that I'll need to close the review. — Bilorv (talk) 13:08, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

@Bilorv: Sorry about the delay, I was having a bit too much fun during winter break. I believe I have addressed your comments. Famous Hobo (talk) 23:17, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

Appreciate it, mostly there now. One point about the 393,000 and a couple about the influences. Did a few spotchecks and didn't find any issues, so just these quick fixes left. — Bilorv (talk) 11:14, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

I've just made these changes myself and I'm now happy that the article meets GA standards, so it's a pass. Cheers! — Bilorv (talk) 12:43, 26 December 2020 (UTC)