Louisiana's Neutral Milk Hotel first surfaced as part of the irreverent tape-splicing pop collective Elephant Six. But with 1996's On Avery Island, the scrambled sonics became more of a mood-ring metaphor for leader Jeff Mangum's hyperactive psyche (as typified by the puritanical folk-punk of “Song Against Sex”). And that relationship only intensified on 1998's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, whose ecstatic odes to Jesus (“The King of Carrot Flowers, Pts. 2 & 3”) and manic meditations on the Holocaust (“Holland, 1945”) proved so emotionally fraught, they drove Mangum into a 15-year hiatus.