Oneida - Happy New Year (Jaguar / Rough Trade)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Oneida make sweaty music. Not as in jump about like a tit music, more of a cold sweat. They sound like headaches, like sickness, like paranoia. But if you've ever enjoyed illness in the way that I do - revelling in the peculiarity of experiencing feelings that you wouldn't be able to create any other way - you'll very much enjoy Oneida.
'Happy New Year' is very very queasy listening. It starts off with some peculiarly dark sounds that come across somehow as both space age and medieval, then unleashes some disjointed melody and hissing on the title track. You'll quite possibly find it all a trial to listen to, but there's much fun to be had in revelling in the idea that it must have been far harder to actually write. Perhaps these people are geniuses. Perhaps.
They're certainly oddballs. It's strange to consider their dedication to discordance, because when they get down to 'proper' (well, recognisable) beat structures and melodies, they're excellent if peculiar songwriters. It's true that there's all kind of hissing and unremitting noise going on whilst they're doing the songs, but the songs themselves, crucially, really are there. Check 'The Adversary' for ammunition on this point - it's really mesmerising -melodically mesmerising. There's something reminiscent of witchcraft about a lot to do with Oneida. Maybe that time spent with Liars rubbed off on them. Rhytmically it certainly has.
They can, you see, be very much a rhythm band. 'Up With People' (sadly not a Lambchop cover) is the best thing here, and it's essentially just a f**ked up beat. There are notes, yeah, but no real tune - you'll dance like a loon to it though. Sheesh, and some people think The Futureheads are jittery. In comparison, they're about as jittery as a carpet. This sounds like electrocuting an ants' nest. And whilst it might be a little long, it's no bother. I'm sure they'll do something else in a minute.
My suspicions are well founded. They next point fingers, on, er, 'Pointing Fingers' - which is noisy, noisy Oneida. Why, whilst they're doing their most beach boys like harmonies, is there this hideous electric squall going on? It makes no sense! I love it! It's terrifying.
Back to the proper songs, and the tripple whammy of 'History's Greatest Navigators' (based around just two insistently hammered piano notes, but still entrancing), the queer folk of 'Busy Little Bee' and gentle but still unnerving guitar plucks of 'Reckoning' prove that in essence, they're songwriters (if peculiar ones), and without this basis the noise and peculiarity to everything else would be crap, superfluous rubbish. To their testament, they use all of it to great effect.
It only really loses focus on 'You Never Can Tell', but regains it in all its unfathomable glory on 'The Misfit'. Let me just listen to it, and report back in a minute or two. Whoa - that song was superbly creepy, and so's the closing 'Thank Your Parents' - all seven terrifyingly incomprehensible minutes of it.
Dear music - please can more people be like Oneida in that they'd sound nothing like Oneida yet share the same vision that this band obviously do - to sound like nobody else? Even if it has gotten me completely freaked out? Please? Much obliged.
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