| · They’re being hailed as a band similar to Sonic Youth in the early ’80s. My ass. They’re from Brooklyn, proving geography has nothing to do with quality.
The first time I heard this record, I liked it. I really did. There was discordance, an adherence to developing songs in unexpected ways and some good noisy parts that offered a hypnotic sort of drone. I wrote a review at that point, with all the requisite descriptors: sturm und drang, explorative, um… hypnotic.
Then I listened to this record again. That is the music reviewer’s fatal flaw. Had my first review been published, you would have been reading a relatively glowing piece about what Oneida is doing, and how they’re doing it, based entirely on one listen – something every reviewer does way more often than they want to admit. I might have said "their ability to create atmospheric soundscapes are evocative of the type of plaintive guitar walls that reference early-’90s indie rock, ’60s psych and art rock." And at times during "Changes in the City," the 14-minute-plus closer, they actually succeed in doing something like this.
For the rest of the album, Oneida annoy, frustrate and disengage the listener from anything they are doing. Rare is the record with such diminishing returns, but repeated listens lead to only one conclusion: Secret Plane should have been a one-song maxi-single. It doesn’t sound like Sonic Youth. It doesn’t sound like Tad. It is not a throwback to anything like what "alternative" was before it was "alternative." It sucks.
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