(Jagjaguwar Records)
When Brooklyn-based Oneida emerged from an abandoned two-story nightclub, the rush to label the group's unique sound began. Its first three albums endured a cornucopia of musical tags, including 'psychedelic,' 'art-rock,' 'avant-garde' and 'retro-garage.' But Oneida has always viewed itself as merely Oneida: a band 'out to kill bad rock.'
'I hesitate to put rock-journalist-style language to use with our music because that always just riles me up,' said Oneida organist Bobby Matador, a.k.a. Far Bobby, in a recent interview. '[Oneida is] extremely loud and unconstrained by fashion.'
All of this non-conformist swagger might be hard to swallow if Oneida's latest effort, , didn't give these sentiments solid ground to stand on. From beginning to end, sounds like a knotted bunch of everything you've ever heard, making something completely singular.
opens with 'New Head,' a 75-second thunderbolt of guitar and layered vocals that soars to a pulsating climax before most albums even get off the ground. This is soon answered with 'All Arounder,' a classic-rock throwback that has an underlying rhythm supporting its various guitar howls.
After these solid rock tracks, Oneida quickly proves that it knows how to soothe as well as scorch. Both 'Geometry' and 'Rose and Licorice' have a soft, flowing dream-like feel that hails back to glory days of The Smashing Pumpkins. But even with their floweriness, both tracks have a structure and drive which allows them to fit into the album.
In fact, it is its constant, moving rhythm blended with an almost tribal sense of vocals that makes unparalleled. Oneida created this mix after spending several days in wooded colonial ruins in western New England. The band brought along a small recording studio, allowing the sounds and atmosphere of these wooded nights to permeate into .
'We wanted to terrify ourselves,' explained Bobby. 'That's what is. We got ourselves into a situation where we could fucking just rip out the most naked, weird, alienated sounds.'
What Oneida fuses together with these recordings is as ghostly as it is organic. 'Almagest' starts a string of stirring, stripped-down rock tracks. Each uses softened vocals to display its unique multi-layered musicality. Where 'Almagest' churns with a chilling druidic tribal chant, 'People of the North' builds from a watery industrial sound up to an energetic guitar solo. This is followed by 'The Wooded World.' Its circular vocals spreading over a bouncy funk line makes it sound nothing short of enchanting.
closes with 'Double Lock Your Mind,' a stunning display of muscle rock meets punk. Oneida wisely waits until the very end to display this one-pound-prime-rib-slab of a track. The band's energy shoots through this track's eight minutes of almost pure guitar.
As skilled as Oneida is with its studio work, it retains a large following in a growing Brooklyn warehouse scene, as opposed to larger clubs. As the band's audience grows, so do its tour sizes and venues. Bobby asserts, however, that every ounce of energy and originality that goes into making an Oneida album, is also conveyed in live performances.
'People should come to see our show because they will never see any shit like that,' Bobby said. 'I'm not saying that everybody will love it. I would never make that claim. But they will never see anything like an Oneida show. It just doesn't happen anywhere else. It might turn you all on. Or it might send you running, screaming to vomit in the gutters.'
But no matter how audiences react to their music, with , Oneida has secured itself as truly one of a kind.
