Beauty (Neutral Milk Hotel album)

Track listing

All songs written by Jeff Mangum except where noted.

1. "Engine" – 4:23
2. "Circle of Friends" – 3:28
3. "Wishful Eyes" – 6:01
4. "Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone" – 5:48
5. "Sailing Through" – 4:37
6. "Bucket" – 3:11
7. "Noisy Racket" – 3:56
8. "Conversation with Will Cullen Hart" – 6:17
9. "Someone is Waiting" – 1:45
10. "Hypnotic Sounds" – 2:09

Additional information

Said to be from 1992. As with Invent Yourself a Shortcake, it's debatable whether this cassette is an actual "album" or just a collection of recordings Jeff put together. No original physical copy is known to exist. It is possible that Jeff put this tape together for friends and it wound up online.

The first five tracks are solo acoustic with Jeff talking a little bit before and after each song, as if he's playing an acoustic show in front of people (though there appears to be only one other person in the room). "Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone" is much slower than the familiar, released version. The second half of the tape features two electric songs and three non-songs: "Noisy Racket" (possibly not the song's real title; a metal freak out), "Conversation with Will Hart" (often mislabeled "Conversation with Robert Schneider"; not a song, but just what the title implies), and the sound collage track "Aunt Eggma Blowtorch" (often labeled "Hypnotic Sounds"; the same version as found on the Everything Is single, only here it has an extra minute-long jam at the beginning.)

It seems every circulating version of this tape is a bit poppy in the left channel, sounding as if it were transferred from vinyl. However, the right channel sounds fine. It remains unknown if the original tape was made that way, or if it's just a defect present on the particular copy that made its way online.