
The ghost of Jeff Mangum—the Neutral Milk Hotel weird-genius who has mostly disappeared from the national eye since 1998's undisputed classic In the Aeroplane, Over the Sea —lingers throughout "The Afterlife Pt. 1," the slowly growing ballad that serves as the centerpiece to Run On Sentence's gorgeously ramshackle new record Oh When the Wind Comes Down . You can hear it in the way Dustin Hamman stretches out the last syllable of each verse, the way his nasally croon cracks when he hits an especially painful word. And those words are vulnerable almost to a fault; every strain [...]