ONEIDA
Happy New Year
Jagjaguwar
· More genre-hopping, Williamsburgh-style – Brooklyn’s Oneida take an unsuspected turn.
Oneida are an unpredictable lot. While their earliest gestures easily lived up to the title of second album Come on Everybody Let’s Rock, the Oneida of Happy New Year is a group following a similar path to their fellow ex-N.Y.C. experimentalist neighbours, Liars.
While they’re not quite as abstract as the Liars behind Drum’s Not Dead (yet), Bobby Matador, Kid Millions and Hanoi Jane (the best three pseudonyms going at the moment) have obviously grown beyond their MC5 obsessions, digging deeper into the dusty corners of their local used record shops and pulling out bits of Can, Neu! and Pere Ubu. The repetitive motifs of "Up With People" and "History’s Great Navigators" hammer their point home – it’s a bit like a hypnotist yelling in your face until you go under. As "Busy Little Bee" and "Reckoning" take an unsuspected turn into somewhat more pastoral freak-folk territory, the results come off surprisingly snug. Still, given Oneida’s previous wanderings all over the map, it’s not altogether unexpected they’ve still got at least a few tricks up their sleeves.
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