The Sound of Oneida’s Latest, Anthem of the Moon, Is Pure New York City

Hanoi Jane,
one of the guys in Oneida, does this thing with his guitar. It usually comes
toward the end of their set, in the midst of a storm of noise, a good five or
six minutes from any sign of vocals. There’s a shirtless, bearded man bashing
away on the drums and a guy you can’t see playing a wildly paranoid, jumpy
riff on an organ, a few fast notes over and over. Just about the time you wonder
how long the "song" has been going on, Jane turns into a sleeper agent
with a sudden mission. He lifts his guitar above his bald head, holding it high
with both hands. The expression drops from his already somewhat expressionless
face and he slowly walks off the stage, heading directly into the audience like
a zombie, his eyes half-shut and his jaw fallen. People scoot out of his way
but don’t follow him. Eventually he makes his way back to the stage and
the show goes on.

Like a lot
of things Oneida does, this is a brilliant act of rock parody and a pretty snazzy
move in itself. The guitar is lifted high and paraded before the crowd like
a prehistoric totem–like a wood-and-metal phallic symbol, which is exactly
what the electric guitar has represented for the last 50 years. It’s
an echo of Ozzy lifting Randy Rhoads or Nugent shooting fire from his ax in
"sheer predator glee," but here there’s nobody cheering, no girls
tossing their bras onstage, no pumping devil horns rising from the crowd. It’s
just one bald guy making a joke that nobody seems to get.

Oneida’s
continuing joke is rock as a tribal ceremony, happening somewhere on the other
side of the mountain pictured on Houses of the Holy. Their new
album, Anthem of the Moon (Jagjaguwar), their fourth, has a cover image
similar to Zep’s 1973 masterpiece–a mountain of rocky ruins in a completely
empty landscape, glowing in weird iridescent colors, with abandoned stone stairs
leading to a pagan summit. It could be anywhere–J.R.R. Tolkien, Aleister
Crowley, Holy Diver. But the basic idea is the same on Anthem
as it is on Houses: climb the mountain, carry the guitar, feel the winds
of Thor up there blowin’ cold. Yet from the first frantic organ riff on
a 1:15 spasm called "New Head," it’s obvious that this is not
the moody, rain-softened land of "D’yer Mak’er" and "No
Quarter." Nor is it the pseudo anarcho-commune rock of the MC5, the band
that Oneida is most often compared to. (The MC5, for all their "testifying"
and willingness to play behind whatever the hell John Sinclair was talking about,
never lost their lunkheaded garage-rock roots, which makes Oneida far too disorderly
to be a real descendant.)

It’s
also not the sound of the Oneida Community in upstate New York, the real 19th-century
commune from which the band takes its name. The Oneida Community was a group
of a few hundred misguided utopian fundamentalists who gave up on the whole
new-Eden thing after a few decades and became the profitable, publicly traded
Oneida Community, Ltd., makers of fine silverware since 1880. This sound is
pure New York City. It’s lofts in South Williamsburg, it’s Brownies
and the Knitting Factory, where bands tend not to care much for mythology but
have long pursued a few attributes that come down from Dionysus: crazy, noisy,
high. Oneida is the consummate New York noise band, following directly in a
tradition that starts with the Velvet Underground, and from there goes to Suicide
and Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, Unsane, etc.

What’s
striking to me is that though we are currently in the midst of something of
a renaissance of New York Music, Oneida isn’t part of it. In the past year,
the This Is Next Year compilation has come out, codifying the
Brooklyn "scene" (i.e., bands who have at least one person living
in Brooklyn, and work as temps up and down the IRT in Manhattan) in an historic
collection that will ultimately prove to be as important and epochal as New
York Hardcore and No New York. The four men in Oneida (Kid
Millions, drums; Papa Crazy, guitars; Bobby Matador, keyboards; Hanoi Jane,
guitars) all live in Brooklyn, have a studio in Brooklyn and developed their
craft through years of playing parties in Brooklyn. But don’t look for
Oneida on This Is Next Year. Also this year, two new bands have emerged
to represent the new face of New York Rock all over the world: the Strokes and
the Moldy Peaches, both on tour now. (The Strokes are getting a small backlash
since they’ve received way, way more press than they deserve, but it’s
not their fault; they’re a good band with good songs and they look good
in pictures.)

And where
is Oneida in all of this? They’re doing well (they’ve also recently
returned from touring), but they’ve not gotten the credit they deserve
as a New York band. There’s a good reason for this: they don’t need
it. Unlike Mink Lungs, Les Savy Fav, the Walkmen, Black Beetle and some other
local bands on This Is Next Year, Oneida are good enough and original
enough to stand on their own without much hometown boosterism. They’ve
played this to their advantage, saying in early interviews that they avoided
the East Village and headed for Williamsburg lofts because the Manhattan establishment
didn’t give a shit about them. This is only partly true–without revealing
their actual identities, I can say that the Oneida boys are far more connected
than they let on; over the years they’ve had jobs working at record labels
and booking shows at major venues in New York. But it is entirely true that
they never had anything greater than a strictly underground reputation–they
never became a Moldy Peaches. What little mainstream attention Oneida has received
came after Greil Marcus wrote a "Real Life Rock Top 10" item in Salon
last summer praising the jam-out bonus track on their Steel Rod EP. The
Voice and Spin quickly played catchup with short blurbs and that
was it; the fact that they are from New York was only incidental.

Once you
press play it becomes obvious that, like Zeppelin, Oneida has the rare gift
of being able to inhabit a self-willed musical landscape that becomes more vivid
and attractive the longer it is beheld. After a few songs off Anthem of the
Moon, you experience the same sense of being drawn into a noisy demimonde
that you get from Led Zeppelin I or Suicide’s first album, where
pulsating synthesizers carved out a nightmarish realm for spooks like Ghost
Rider and Frankie Teardrop, who could only have come from New York in the 70s.
Oneida’s music will likely never reach the level of Suicide’s, because
of their need for silly flamboyance and lack of any honest or expressive lyrics.
But the cumulative sonic effect is the same for both: frantic dizziness in a
place you don’t understand, a trip that is slightly bad.

Anthem
of the Moon was recorded carefully and meticulously by the band itself in
Brooklyn, and together with their last CD, Come on Everybody Let’s
Rock (Jagjaguwar) it is the definitive statement of their art. The new disc
begins with a fast, disorienting keyboard riff and ends in a 12-minute jam.
Every song has a throbbing feeling, and even where it’s slow, the music
never drags. There’s a lust and dedication to purpose that runs through
the album as a whole. And the lyrics are ignorable throughout, another thing
that is often true about great rock albums. There may well be some very clever
lyrical riffs in there, like the lines from Come on Everybody’s
"Power Animals" on the controversial Hayes-Tilden election of 1876
("The people for Tilden/Were treated like children/Way back when in ’76").
But ultimately all this doesn’t matter as much as one good drum fill.

Anthem
finds Oneida straying occasionally into the slightly jazzy, avant-whatever
territory that reveals the band’s roots in the downtown scene–downtown
Manhattan. I hear a bit of Marty Rev’s claustrophobic synths in
"People of the North." "Dead Worlds" is a slow, beatless
come-down that sounds vaguely like something from Sonic Youth’s Sister,
and "All Arounder," the single here if there was to be one, is the
classic Oneida song, an unstable composite of insane guitar noise, repetitive
organ riffs and inscrutable, chant-like vocals.

These songs
have the traits of so-called experimental music: a wash of dissonance, a long,
asymmetric groove, a song deliberately ruined by too much repetition. But Oneida’s
musical explorations are no more extreme than, say, Tool’s: the
foundation of their music is pop. Weird pop. Crazy New York let’s-get-fucked-up-for-the-sake-of-getting-fucked-up
pop. Like all pop it has a strong reliance on quick hooks and the constant propulsion
of a small number of motives, verses flowing seamlessly into bridges, choruses
and solos, all carefully orchestrated buildups into pseudoerotic climaxes. Zep
relied on the sharp poison of electric guitar for this effect, and Oneida used
that same attack plan on Come on Everybody. But the band seems to have
figured out that those songs have more immediate punch but less atmosphere,
and has returned to the spooky dominance of the keyboard. Bobby Matador, aka
Fat Bobby, the boyishly charming and only actually good-looking member of the
band, does a fantastic job balancing the many layers of keyboard noise on Anthem.

Live, Oneida
is invincible, but they’re still waiting for their definitive concert in
Manhattan. (This Sunday’s show with Erase Errata could be the one.) A smart
promoter could put them on a bill with, say, the Boredoms or someone deliberately
groove-oriented like Antibalas (another Brooklyn phenomenon not on This Is
Next Year) and double his local audience. Blending Suicide and Zep is a
pretty unique achievement. As their musical forefathers knew, when done right
the groove can be almost tribal. Time for the tribe to grow?

Oneida plays
with Erase Errata, the Sightings and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on Sun., Oct. 28, at
the Frying Pan, Pier 63, W. 23rd St. (12th Ave.), 989-6363.