:: Track Listing

1. Distress
2. Happy New Year
3. The Adversary
4. Up With People
5. Pointing Fingers
6. History’s Great Navigators
7. Busy Little Bee
8. Reckoning
9. You Can Never Tell
10. The Misfit
11. Thank Your Parent

:: Record Review

Oneida

Happy New Year
(Jagjaguwar; 2006)

Rating: 85%
Combined Rating: 80%


Oneida’s The Wedding possesses the dubious accolade of having been the first album I reviewed for CMG. Not unlike a first-year college student beginning his big term paper with “since the beginning of time, man has written The Novel,” I began that review overreaching for ways in which the album spoke about indie music, music in general, art in the 21st Century, history as fuck and on and on, rather than concerning myself with how the album sounds in the background at a cottage party or in headphones on a subway while you watch an elderly couple wordlessly argue. Fresh-faced enthusiasm and naiveté aside, I almost did it again right here. There’s probably something to be said about my repeated tendency to think Oneida make some kind of noise beside that of three guys in a rehearsal room in Brooklyn. With Happy New Year the band continues its unbroken streak of effortlessly constructing testaments to the current (and undercurrent) without sounding pretentious or alien. After all, though the band may be ‘experimental’ in a way that lends itself to wide-lens discussions of upper-case “Music,” no more than attempting to write about indie rock on a grand scale still lends itself to writer’s block.

In the past Oneida haven’t quite managed their musical cartography without sounding, to differing degrees, scattershot or temporarily off-base. Yes, experimentation often means fracturing the ideal at the expense of concision or accessibility, and it’s hard to privilege experimentalism simultaneously with one’s desire to make a mix tape that’s fun to listen to in a car, but my point is that Oneida’s Happy New Year is great because it’s out there and isn’t fractured for it. It caps perfectly a career of confounding expectations while working gradually towards a new ideal, one that this album represents, and one that replaces the placeholder “experimental” with the less loaded word “creative.” Instead of turning around every five years with an album that picks through the bones of genres that never needed revisiting (organized into ramshackle “periods” by the fan faithful), Oneida come back (every year for three years in a row, now) having reorganized the pieces of their own sound into new and exciting arrangements that are wondrously polyphonic and still as efficient as laser beams. Happy New Year, the band’s eighth, latest and possibly best album, is again an album that spoils-for-choice, but now without detriment. Happy New Year is dozens of robotic arms working a factory with one mind, but producing a city scene instead of a car: the modern taking the post-whatever out for a drink.

Spearheading this tantalizingly simple equation is “Up With People,” a simple four/four dance number that unfurls its layers over the course of its almost eight minutes until spread over the landscape of your frontal lobe. Hi-hat accents don’t make sense in the first ten seconds until fudge-fingered keyboards hold hands with them. Whorls of sound descend a half-second after every fourth beat. And then it goes on, mechanizing and building with seemingly limitless endurance, for seven more minutes. “Up With People” mirrors the album’s brilliant midsection lead-off “History’s Great Navigators,” which plucks sounds like leaves out of hair, and latter-half highlight “The Misfit,” with its keyboard science over bass lines sleek as eels. These songs are simple, understandable pop augmented with lustrous, efficient (but wild) noises: pop that doesn’t waste a breath. Every moment of every song is present for a reason, and the unification of purpose behind each song turns out to be the unification of the album that Oneida had yet to achieve. Listening to Happy New Year is pleasure absolute, playing through for hours before anyone thinks to change it.

The album’s title track, like much of the album, has a map of the world on its face. Not unlike “Everything in Its Right Place,” “Happy New Year” seems untranslatable at first or designed to piss off, only to reveal to those willing to listen its underlying structure and melody. “Happy New Year” is no chaos, though perhaps chaos theory - there is order behind the song. “The Adversary” then begins, sounding wholly different but working naturally from where it’s been placed, like The Wedding’s “Lavender” did with snare slams and insistent keyboard wash after opener “The Eiger.” That the band falls back on an album sequencing almost identical to The Wedding seems strange given their penchant for pulling up stakes, but ultimately it makes sense. “The Eiger” sounded great preceding “Lavender,” and “Distress” sounds great preceding “Happy New Year” and “The Adversary.”

More wonderful still: the album declines the need to rent a sitar or invent a keyboard or hire a string section to make sounds incredibly characteristic of the band and immediately likeable. “History’s Great Navigators” buzzes repeating melodies three minutes in, but it does it with mouth percussion while a single piano note is strung along. The songwriting prowess at work here can’t really be taught, and certainly can’t be addressed with additional or unconventional instrumentation and a credit card.

If there is a complaint it’s that Oneida, despite laying down one of the freshest musical beds in the band’s history (which is saying something), continue their unobjectionable, stale, neo-hippy lyrical threads and sentimentalisms. During their triumphant “Up With People,” they provide for our consideration the thought that “you got to get up to get free.” It’s inoffensive, feel-good fun and makes sense in the context of their discography’s many stoner moments, but that the lyrics seem so obvious at this point in the band’s career, and especially on what is essentially the album’s crucial centerpiece, is less disappointing than it is cause for apathy. You won’t be bothered by Oneida’s lyrics, but that’s because lyrics this indifferent can’t even incite annoyance, let alone transcendence.

Small hazard, though, for what must certainly amount to one of the year’s best. It’s telling that Oneida fans can’t get together on which album best represents the band’s sound and songwriting without singling out any one for “bad album” status. (I’m partial to Each One Teach One, while my friend swears by Secret Wars and yet another insists that it’s their “early work” that’s the stuff.) But what makes Happy New Year different than its predecessors is not that it differs song-to-song to a greater degree than a catalogue best-recognized by the fact that it differs song-to-song, but that the quality of each song is finally on par with the song before and after it. Happy New Year is fresh and adventurous and, most important, it is consistently so. Conrad Amenta :: 30 June 2006 |