Oneida - The acid juice of the Big Apple

Oneida are among the key players in New York's great resurgence of the 2000s. Originally from Brooklyn like Liars and Yeah Yeah Yeahs!, they revived the liberating violence of 60s garage-rock, blending it with acid-soaked psychedelic trips, hard/stoner-rock blasts, synthetic wave germs and kraut effervescence. It's music that froths with an obsessive, metallic electronica, where the bass is given elementary, repetitive patterns, while the guitars rage on, hinting at garage and noise, and the drums are unleashed in explosions of raw, untamed violence. The voice is tasked with reflecting this already far-from-uniform music in a distorting mirror: distant, distorted, filtered in various ways, often chanting in a deranged, sing-song manner. A voice that, in its own way, also represents the DNA of this band, which started out playing in Brooklyn's abandoned warehouses and never left its energy behind the shutters, while also reckoning with the fact that, in the 2000s, a musician's background has to be increasingly layered, and it's normal to find, side by side on the same shelf, MC5 and Suicide, or Faust and Kyuss.

The band's original core – which takes its name from a Native American tribe – is made up of guitarist and singer Papa Crazy (aka PCRZ), keyboardist Bobby Matador (aka Fat Bobby), drummer Kid Millions and bassist/guitarist Hanoi Jane (aka Baby Jane). Four nerds with a reassuring look who, once on stage, raise absolute hell, quickly carving out a precious niche for themselves in the New York underground.

In 1997 the small Turnbuckle label gave them the chance to debut, with the album A Place Called El Shaddai's. It's still a somewhat muddled record, too often lost in acid trips and lo-fi experimentalism, but it already bears the trademark of these psychedelic hooligans, capable of staging a wildly "freak" jam across the twelve minutes of "Ballad Of Vaurice", but also opening up to hypnotic, spacey ballads ("Salad Days") and free-jazz improvisations à la Zorn ("Medium Cool"), or setting their guitars ablaze in the dissonances of the opener "Hieronymus" and in the funk-tinged roar of "Ghandi For Now". All of it following in the noble New York tradition first laid down by the Velvet Underground and later carried on by Sonic Youth.

Two years later, again on Turnbuckle, came Enemy Hogs (later reissued by Jagjaguwar, sealing the new alliance with the Brooklyn band).

Twelve abrasive shards, played with a concise ferocity worthy of the best Wire and Husker Du. Already there are wide glimpses of the lucid madness that would inspire the New Yorkers' more mature work, more determined than ever to put chaos at the centre of their music. Rock'n'roll, garage, punk and new wave debris mix with the convulsive phrases of the Hammond organ and free-jazz horns, while morbid Suicide-like beds of sound help fuel a sense of paranoia. Behind the immediacy of the songs lurks an almost "art-rock" attitude, a maniacal search for every shade of sound for every instrument, be it horns, strings or organ.

If the opening "Whitey Fortress" indulges a bit too much in virtuosity for its own sake, there's no shortage of moments of palpitating tension, like the percussive pandemonium of "Primanti Bros.", the acid hallucination of "Hard Working Man", the grimy riffs of "Ginger (Bein' Free)", the electronic hisses of "Turn It: Up (Load)" and "Gettin' It On", or again the metallic harshness of "Quest For Two" and the punk urgency of "Little Red Dolls".

But the record's real tours de force are two: "Bombay Fraud", an exotic avant-rock piece that unwinds over morbid cadences, amid obsessive horns, noise, reverb and alienating voices, and the closing "O.L.B.", "rescued" for the Jagjaguwar reissue: a nerve-wracking "free" jam the band put together after the murder of Old Dirty Bastard of the Wu Tang Clan in 1998.

The singles "Best Friends" (1999) and "Steel Rod" (2000) fuel anticipation for the third album, Come On Everybody Let's Rock (2000), this time directly on Jagjaguwar. It's a passionate tribute to the band's rock roots, drawing mostly on the past, in a frenetic recycling operation that spins together the heavy harshness of Deep Purple and Blue Cheer, the hooks of Humble Pie and Foghat, the frenzy of Mc5 and even the bittersweet noise of Jesus and Mary Chain. All of it backed by hefty doses of self-irony, as on the opening "I Love Rock", a punk neuro-delirium built entirely on distorted, demented vocalisations, or in the exuberant swagger of "Major Havoc" (a nod to "Sergeant Rock" by Xtc?).

The science of the riff, of which the Brooklyn band are masters, keeps bearing fruit ("Legion Of Scags", "Doin' Business In Japan") and goes hand in hand with the ability to hit the target with the bare minimum of frills ("Pure Light Invasion", "Fat Bobby's Black Thumb"). But there's also room for morbidly wave atmospheres ("Snow Machine") and a psychedelic tribute to the 13th Floor Elevator (the cover of "Slip Inside This House").

Overall, a more derivative record than its predecessors, but perhaps also a more mature one, in both sound and arrangements.

The following Anthem Of The Moon (Jagjaguwar, 2001) is the final act with Papa Crazy, who would part ways with the band at the end of the year. A vibrant record, recorded "in the stones", in a mobile unit set up among the ruins of the colonial era in New England. Settings evoking an arcane, mysterious nature, also captured through numerous field recordings of noises, human voices and animal calls. And the band's fascination with energy is renewed, used as a tool for exploring consciousness. The resulting sound is this time more psychedelic and paranoid, leaning on acid improvisations ("Double Lock Your Mind", "To Seed and Flower"), crooked rhythms ("Geometry", built entirely on contrasts between consonance and dissonance, but also the hypnotic "The Wooded World") and "black holes" of cosmic apathy ("People Of The North"), while "Almagest" condenses all the mysterious atmosphere of the places where the record was conceived, amid ghosts, owl calls and kraut-rock paranoia. Oneida's psychedelia is intimately tied to individual visions of the universe, and feeds on every human experience (fear, alienation, rejection, but also grace and ecstasy) in a wide-spectrum kaleidoscope.

But, all things considered, the New York disruptors also prove themselves skilled melodists. Just listen to the opening "New Head", the most markedly wave track, with an obsessive synth and a distorted riff breaking up the linearity of the chorus, the even catchier "All Arounder", with its catchy vocalisations counterbalancing the chaos of the instruments, and the hypnotic ballad "Rose And Licorice". The noise drifts also return ("Still Rememberin Hidin In The Stones") as do the demented pastiches ("Ballad Of Impervium"), while "Double Lock Your Mind" launches into an orgy of dissonance that already hints at the "paroxysmal" landing point of Each One Teach One.

So much going on, then, for a work that, while not shining for compactness and still suffering from a certain flatness in the vocal parts, already offers an exhaustive sampler of that Oneida sound destined to become one of the most creative trademarks of the decade.

For the Big Apple these are years of great ferment, which will culminate in the explosion of bands like Interpol, Liars, Yeah Yeah Yeahs!, Rapture and - on the more mainstream front - Strokes. For Oneida, the "big bang" is called Each One Teach One (2002), one of the few records to survive the bulimic spiral of a decade that consumes and forgets everything in a hurry.

And yet, kicking off the album is one of their most absurd and provocative tracks: "Sheets Of Easter", 14 minutes in which the band plays the exact same riff (interrupted by just two breaks!) of a hypothetical, immensely powerful garage-rock song, a paroxysm closer to a sneer than to experimentation, but certainly good fun. In the next episode, which takes up the other half of the first disc, Oneida however prove they can play it straight: "Antibiotics" is a track split into two parts, a psychedelic hard-rock delirium that for its first 10 minutes presents itself as a new-millennium "Sister Ray", thanks to an obsessive organ phrase, and which manages to pair the epilepsy of a broken rhythm with the violence of guitars and bass, mercilessly battered. All of it until the organ crumbles into a dust of noise and feedback, crossed by an alienating spoken part that sounds like a children's nursery rhyme, before fading into pure noise.

The second disc proves more conventional, at least in terms of track length. And the music too shows different facets. Garage impetuousness, then, but steeped in electronics à la Suicide, contrasts drawn from Chrome, as well as from Faust-style kraut-rock. Something not too far from the contemporary debut of another revelation band: Xiu Xiu. Oneida aren't simply rock enough to fall into banality, nor too cerebral to end up in musical navel-gazing. This is how they produce tracks like the acid nursery rhyme "Number Nine", the pulsing Suicide-style synth of "People Of The North" (carried over from the previous record), the sickly, slightly dubby carousel of "No Label", but also the full-throttle title track, which unleashes a riff straight out of '70s hard-rock.

Celebrating the renaissance of the New York underground that same year is the split with Liars, Atheists Reconsider. A sort of meeting-clash in which each band plays at remaking (in pieces) the other's songs, with an appendix of a couple of unreleased tracks each, for a total of 26 minutes of music. Oneida turn out a couple of full-throttle garage-punk tracks ("Privilege", "Fantasy Morgue") and tear into the corpse of the Liars' "Every Day Is A Child With Teeth". Of the latter's contributions, a wonderfully strange pop version of "Rose & Licorice" stands out.

Fuelled by a series of fiery live performances, anticipation grows for Oneida's new album, Secret Wars, which arrives right on schedule in 2004. No strange provocation à la "Sheets Of Easter" this time, but the continuation of the project begun on Anthem Of The Moon and carried forward on the second disc of its successful follow-up. The tracks, well road-tested through live performances, lack the impetuousness and rough edges - in a good sense - typical of those shows; nor do we find the quantity of acid, kraut-style distortions that enriched Each One Teach One. All the tracks are sung, except for the long closing jam; vocals which, in all three members, have certainly never been a strong point, as flat and plain as they are.

The lazy psychedelia of the opening “Treasure Plane” is the album’s calling card: a well-crafted circular melody, the vocals quiet and distant, interrupted by a lopsided psychedelic bridge. The more rhythmic “Ceasar’s Column” follows nicely, with drummer Kid Millions very much to the fore, and a psychedelic vortex that sucks in the instruments, almost melting them into one another. “Capt. Bo Dignifies The Allegations With A Response” is a brief garage foray adorned with the shrill pounding of Hanoi Jane’s keyboard.

These are tracks that add nothing to what was already known about Oneida, who even throw themselves into a curious, if pointless, homage to grunge with “Wild Horses”. Far better to come across the little torpedo “$50 Tea”, relentless and obsessive, further embellished by a hard-blues bridge that reeks of masterfully executed stoner-rock. It's a shame, though, that when they try their hand at a curious country-psychedelic track, “The Last Act, Every Time”, they fail to leave a mark, and following it with another song like “The Winter Snake”, built on the repetition of a single guitar chord, makes the whole thing feel more like filler. Partially redeeming the album's fortunes, finally, is the long psychedelic ride of “Changes In The City”, where Hanoi Jane's organ meets that of Ray Manzarek.

A record without direction, then, where by that we mean precisely a movement towards something. Simply a pleasant, clear, sincere portrait.

Added to their relentless output is a new EP, Nice. Splittin' Peaches (2004). Four tracks that don't change the course of their career, but do reaffirm its strong kraut (the delirious liturgy of “Summerland”), wave (the twisted “Inside My Head”) and psychedelic (the 15 minutes of lysergic sprawl of “Hakuna Matata”) leanings.

But surprises are just around the corner. Or rather, inside the “biggest music box on the East Coast”. A collection of contraptions of every kind assembled by the band in a New York warehouse: sheets of plywood, pieces of old industrial machinery, abandoned naval gears and more than 70 saw blades that screech against a variety of nails and metal spikes simply by turning a crank.

But - as mentioned - the “box” holds surprises. Despite the menacing arsenal, the psychedelic hooligans of Each One Teach One unexpectedly swerve towards melody, even unveiling a string section arranged by Brian Coughlin (avant-garde musician and leader of the Fireworks Ensemble).

Enter then The Wedding, the fateful “baroque pop masterpiece” the band had been promising since 2001. “A record made of choruses that are good for the heart.” The fact is that their epileptic jams have suddenly “shrunk” into short songs (save for the 7 minutes of space-blues delirium of “The Beginning Is Nigh”), though still shot through with flashes of hallucination.

“The Eiger” opens and it almost sounds like Hanoi Jane reciting a Shakespearean sonnet accompanied by a chamber orchestra. A joke? Perhaps, because “Lavender” immediately follows to bring back the “usual” Oneida: aggressive guitar riffs, drumming assaults, a barrage of keyboards and the raspy vocals shape a nightmare in the vein of the best new wave. But there's something even more “ancient” in the music of these four New York garage-rockers. Something that takes on the contours of the Eastern-tinged liturgy of “Spirits”, with its slow, Velvet-like ceremonial pace amid menacing organ swirls, tinkling bells and a dark guitar mantra, or of the even more solemn “Heavenly Choir”, marked by squared-off drumming and sharp guitar riffs.

When the surreal register then takes over, one might stumble upon the videogame for synths and deranged little organs of “High Life” or the drunken little march for strings of “Know”. And, at the peak of tension, one ends up entangled in the sulphurous pastiche of “Did I Die”, which starts off Black Sabbath, with guitars that grate on the nerves, and derails into an unpredictable krautrock-tinged epilogue.

These are episodes of hypnotic charm, built on fits of dark, sickly (dis)harmonies, which turn baroque intent into grotesque exasperation rather than frivolous ornament. Just listen to the folktronica gag of “Run Through My Air”, with its pompous acoustic arpeggios, to be convinced. At other times, however, it seems Oneida still don't quite know how to handle this new material with mastery, as when they attempt to clone late-period Mercury Rev (“You're Drifting”, sung by Jane in a dreamy, Donahue-like register over a backdrop of electronic gurgles, and “Charlemagne”, with a little psychedelic voice amid a carousel of synths and violins) or produce listless folk sketches (the closing “August Morning Haze”).

It may not be “a baroque pop masterpiece” and will probably remain an isolated episode in their discography, but The Wedding confirms that Oneida are a band of real worth.

But even the milestone of The Wedding had to be surpassed. Because the New York band keeps on scrambling genres and styles. The usual magic box, in other words. A box capable of anything, of shuffling the deck with effortless nonchalance.

Across the eleven tracks of Happy New Year (2006), Oneida come across as experimental yet extremely communicative. Is New York gradually freeing itself from its most recent ghosts? It would seem so, to the point that the medieval-like, almost arcane aura of “Distress” could almost serve as an omen of new “parallel” worlds. Folk and psychedelia, but as they were expressed back in the '60s. Out-folk, to be precise, complete with Middle Eastern scales on “Busy Little Bee” and “watery” voices, stretched out and shot through with evanescent drones in the tiptoeing ballad “Reckoning”. But that's only half the story. And the title track itself is the first to remind us of this: a sticky, synthetic, circular midtempo number, distorted organ, piano ramblings in the air. All of it fencing in a field of flower-power paranoia. But “The Adversary” doesn't hold back either, a triumphant fanfare stretched along a sparkling, quasi-robotic yet polyrhythmic groove. In short, a “carnivalesque” discourse on the never-dying body of rock. And how could it be otherwise, considering “Up With People”: urban physicality, stellar emotion. A funky-krautrockedelic toy.

It's a dancey trip, a hallucination, as usual postmodern and raucous, but gripped by the thrill of panic. And when the guitar derails into acid distortion, it's a glorious scrambling of the senses. Electronic cotton candy and darkish vocals (“Pointing Fingers”), synthesizers like pinball machines of minimal piano melodies, little noises, harmonic frictions (“History's Great Navigators”, proof that there's also a more jovial side to the Liars' lysergic rituals) and a sly game of mirrors, vocal torpor, small sonic refractions (the martial “You Can Never Tell”). And while “The Misfit” can still be described as pop at its core, it's nonetheless a pop born, miraculously, at the crossroads of motorik, Indian-tinged psychedelia (the distorted organ, very early-period Pink Floyd) and counterpoints like relentless palpitations. That the closing “Thank Your Parents” turns out to be “merely” a bored march with a simple little piano motif changes little.

The circle closes, as it should. And nicely done, too. There's plenty here to be satisfied with.

The anthology Seeds Of Contemplation (2007) collects some of their tracks, partly rearranged and revisited.

In the summer of 2008, after three years in the making, Preteen Weaponry came out, announced as the first part of a trilogy called "Thank Your Parents". It's a kraut-rock record of the kind they used to make, a sort of Hawkwind meets Suicide meets Neu, which is essentially the band's stylistic signature.

Here, though, it's monotony that rules, a monotony that's even more pronounced and hypnotic, as in the first part of the suite ("Preeten Weaponry Part 1"), where the drums hammer out a robotic rhythm over which an intricate texture of synth and guitar is built. The sound is cyclical and minimal, yet ordered and systematic. The comparison with tracks like "Sheets Of Easter" or "Antibiotics" therefore makes little sense. Whereas, in that case, Oneida unleashed their explosive physicality, here there's control, almost as if the tension had imploded or even been held back.

The second "Preeten Weaponry" is, however, the standout track of the record. Imagine a gigantic krautedelic moloch advancing slowly, leaving the listener no escape. When the vocals then come into play, the suite takes flight, reaching the cosmic vertigo of Ash Ra Tempel. The third part, on the other hand, is the weakest. Here Kid Millions' alienating drumming blends poorly with the psychedelic-stasis shape of the texture, and this mismatch makes the sound rather confused. That said, it doesn't undermine the overall quality of the record.

The second part of the trilogy, the triple album Rated O (2009), allows the band to engage, with mixed results, with three different musical attitudes. No common thread, no internal coherence, just a play of souls overlapping, at best, in the listener's mind and heart. The effect, sadly, is the well-known case of the mountain giving birth to a mouse. And yet the first record had given reason for hope...

One after another, then, we get a shamanic dance among kraut-dub shadows and scattered digital abstractions ("Brownout in Lagos"), minimal-electro palettes ("What's Up Jackal"), oppressive, futuristic circling techno-cosmic hypnosis ("10:30 at the Oasis"), a crooked kraut-wave panzer ("Story of O") and a hallucinated psychodrama prophesying the imminent arrival of an android humanity ("The Human Factor"). A truly great listen. The pity is that, from this point on, the creative tension starts to fade. Acid-soaked hard-rock, then ("The River"), a trip wandering through piles of distortion and bubbling furnaces ("I Will Haunt You", "Luxury Travel"), wagging-tail nursery rhymes ("The Life You Preferred"), grueling, rocky perversions ("Ghost In The Room"), Pink Floyd echoes and brazen garage features ("Saturday", "It Was a Wall"). Nothing, in any case, that can compete with the fire of their past.

Even less convincing, the third part basks in its love of acid-raga stretching, laying out, with a certain indolence, the metaphysical tension and carnal instinct of "O" and "End Of Time", as well as the very long "Folk Wisdom", predictable in its repetition of the space-delic ride cliché, all stretched toward some unspecified point in the cosmos, without much fuel (read: ideas) on board.

Completing the trilogy, 2011 brings Absolute II, a dark, monolithic epilogue made of long, spectral dissertations poised between post-industrial music and soured ambient, confirming a period of constant metamorphosis for the New York outfit.

Grueling, esoteric minimalism, ready to curl up inside sinister post-atomic oases ("Pre_Human") or within the folds of a gaseous concrete-music, where the voice is by now reduced to an android creak, laden too with an occult dread ("Horizon") — the sound of "Absolute II" turns decisively toward non-rock shores, exalting the possibility of working shapeless, and in its own way off-putting, material. In this sense, the trilogy has done nothing but highlight a progressive drift away from their original musical forms, and, at least in this, our subjects show they want to keep experimenting, even accepting the risk of uncertain results.

Closing the circle are the hermetic, glacial "Gray Area" (in which the sparse guitar explosions and an overall impenetrable atmosphere seem to want to mediate between Dead C's "Suffer Bomb Damage" and any random postcard from Winter's hell) and a funereal title track, the last outpost of despair.

Moving along the same free, restless lines is A List of the Burning Mountains (2012), a work split into two long jams of visionary music that only rarely manage to recall their best moments, because it's all suspended in a limbo of grainy synths, rough feedback, noise phase-shifts and spatial trills that seem to have been assembled with no clear direction. Slightly more measured, the second movement raises the level of psychedelic opalescence, structuring a timid Pink Floyd-like flight that grows out of all proportion until it brushes, in the finale, against catastrophe (itself rather formulaic...).

After a not-exactly-thrilling free-rock collaboration with the éminence grise of New York avant-garde rock Rhys Chatham (What's Your Sign?, 2016), Oneida get back on track with Romance, a record in which that experimental rock built on psychedelia, krautrock, noise and the rest, which had defined the quintet's previous records, lives through highs (very few) and lows (many), settling into a marginal position. The best moment on the record is probably contained in the over eighteen minutes of "Shepherd's Axe", in which the band, breaking more decisively from the sound that has always defined them, tries to chew over the more stretched-out trajectories of their own music, producing a kind of mental trip where cosmic musings, impro-rock flare-ups, Eastern mirages and free-form drumming all coexist.

Four years later, the band does better with Success, which, on top of the basic formula, adds, as drummer Kid Millions recalls, echoes of Jonathan Richman and Velvet Underground, as well as decent doses of that New Zealand guitar-pop which, between the Eighties and the following decade, found shelter in the shadow of the legendary Flying Nun. The seven tracks gathered here are a pleasure to listen to, starting with "Beat Me To The Punch", whose jangling guitar chime (which seems to evoke a jangle-pop variant of Ramones) morphs into a blazing distortion that drags on like a schizophrenic drone almost until the very last groove. The abrasive "Opportunities" and the crackling lead single "I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand" also slide by in a thoroughly enjoyable way, the first escorted by a whole series of electronic flourishes reminiscent of a second-era Chrome track, albeit with less existential dread in the rear-view mirror, the second a catchy love-song racing toward unreachable horizons. With "Low Tide", which runs nearly nine minutes, we enter that krautrock tunnel where repetition, hypnosis and obsession go hand in hand. A tunnel Oneida know extremely well and which, indeed, they travel with great confidence in their own abilities, aided by Fat Bobby's keyboards, which in the second half push the track toward a thunderously noisy conflagration out among far-off galaxies. The echo of the great German musical era — that of Can, Faust and Neu!, to be clear — comes roaring back in the nearly eleven minutes of "Paralyzed", where synthesizers and filtered guitars find in a relentless rhythm the backdrop against which to project their unstable duel made of oblique phrasing, abstract colorings, bold brushstrokes and alien wails.

Success is a constant back-and-forth between well-aimed "earthly" blows and glances cast beyond the exosphere, as shown too by the closing one-two of "Rotten" and "Solid" — punk shot straight into the stars, the first; a scorching heavy-psych jam, the second.

In 2024 comes Expensive Air, in which the band pushes further toward the more accessible tracks of "Success". The result is a series of songs that won't disappoint their most die-hard fans and will certainly please those who, in rock, seek above all (only?) an easy escape from the ugliness of the surrounding world — even though this seventeenth record from the New York band was conceived, in Bobby Matador's own words, as "a darker, looser and noisier counterpart to Success".

Let's be clear: listening to these eight tracks – including a lengthy cover of "Gunboats" by the Swell Maps, here in a slightly faster version enriched with emotional ups and downs – goes down smoothly without a hitch, and yet with every listen the feeling grows stronger that, compared to the previous album, the New Yorkers have lost a step, which is understandable enough, given that the band has now been around for almost thirty years and has to make a virtue of necessity. That said, it's no surprise that the album opens with a track like "Reason To Hide", nothing more than yet another variant of their classic psychedelic gallop, which also owes a great deal to krautrock ("Salt" will later knock on those same doors too), bending the instruments to trace a cadenced, hypnotic rhythmic path, around which sounds and noise are left to explode, while edging ever closer to the deepest space without ever quite touching its limit. The riffage runs wild, and even Kid Millions' voice, clouded by asteroids, seems to betray a dark excitement. The effect is, of course, guaranteed, not to say a foregone conclusion.

Solid but overall less compelling, "Spill" instead leaves open ground for acid guitar distortion, the kind that on "La Plage" thickens around a whirling idea of Dead Kennedys filtered through the goth-punk cadences of the Misfits. The central one-two punch of "Stranger" and "Here It Comes" is, for its part, the album's most gripping moment (the former at the mercy of a roaring rhythm section and space-psych trappings, the latter awash in boundless catchiness). Probably the most interesting grooves are found on the title track, which brings to mind an oblique reworking of Americana.

Thirty-four minutes after its first cry, "Expensive Air" confirms that Oneida are still capable of wringing something worthwhile out of whatever's left in the bag of their inspiration.

Contributions by Francesco Nunziata ("Happy New Year", "Rated O", "Absolute II", "A List Of The Burning Mountains", "Romance", "Success") and Antonio Ciarletta ("Preteen Weaponry")

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