ONEIDA - Each One Teach One

A while back, Italian state TV used to frequently air a clip from an old vaudeville show in which a comedian was simply filmed laughing uncontrollably, boorishly, and above all for no apparent reason at all; the intended effect - and the one it achieved - was to trigger, by a sort of chain reaction, laughter in the viewer, shortly after they'd asked themselves "is this guy an idiot, what's so funny?". Well, Oneida, a Brooklyn quartet on their fourth album, achieve a very similar effect with the opening track of this latest record, "Each One Teach One": the title of the bone of contention is "Sheets Of Easter", 14 minutes in which the band plays the exact same riff over and over (interrupted by just two breaks!) of a hypothetical, extremely powerful garage-rock song - a paroxysm closer to a sneer than to experimentation, but definitely fun, at least until you get thrown out of the house.

On the next track, which takes up the other half of the first disc, Oneida 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 plays like a "Sister Ray" for the new millennium, thanks to an obsessive organ riff, and that manages to combine the epilepsy of a broken-up rhythm with the violence of guitars and bass, mercilessly battered. All this until the organ crumbles into a dust of noise and feedback, crossed by an alienating spoken-word part that sounds like a nursery rhyme, before fading away into pure noise.

After two blows like that, you might wonder what awaits on the other disc, but the track lengths alone are reassuring, being decidedly more conventional. The music, too, shows a different side. Liberating, fun garage-rock violence, then, but steeped in electronics in the vein of Suicide, with contrasts reminiscent of Chrome, as well as of krautrock à la Faust, while among their contemporaries they can bring to mind another great 2002 debut, that of Xiu Xiu. Oneida, then, are not too straightforwardly rock to fall into banality, and not too cerebral to end up in musical navel-gazing. This is how they come up with tracks like the acid nursery rhyme "Number Nine", the pulsing Suicide-esque synth of "People of the North", the sick, vaguely dubbed-out carousel of "No Label", but also the breakneck title track, which unleashes a riff straight out of 70s hard rock.

This is music that froths with obsessive, metallic electronics, in which the bass is given elementary, repetitive patterns, while the guitars run riot, hinting at garage and noise, and the drums are unleashed in explosions of raw, untamed violence. The voice is tasked with reflecting this music - already far from univocal in itself - as 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 hasn't left its energy behind those shutters, but has to reckon with the fact that, in 2002, a musician's - and a fan's - background is increasingly layered, and it's perfectly normal to find, side by side on the same home record shelf, MC 5 and Suicide, or Faust and Kyuss.

Coming, as mentioned, from Brooklyn like Liars (with whom they've collaborated) and Yeah Yeah Yeahs!, two other debut acts that have come to prominence in recent months, Oneida are part of the same extremely lively scene, and contribute decisively to making the Big Apple today's most important city for rock. Just a small word of warning: don't let the first track intimidate you, that really would be a shame - maybe start with the second, more accessible disc, but then work up the nerve to listen to the album as it was meant to be heard; it'll be worth it.

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04/11/2006