:: Track Listing

1. The Eiger
2. Lavender
3. Spirits
4. Run Through My Hair
5. High Life
6. Did I Die
7. You’re Drifting
8. Charlemagne
9. Know
10. Heavenly Choir
11. Leaves
12. The Beginning is Nigh
13. August Morning Haze

:: Record Review

Oneida

The Wedding
(Jagjaguwar; 2005)

Rating: 84%
Combined Rating: 81%


In John Leland’s appropriately titled history book of hip, Hip: The History, he states, “It makes more sense to think of pop evolution as additive rather than derivative – every change adds something, even if just through accidents of faulty copying.” When listening to Oneida’s The Wedding, their seventh album (and their best since 2002’s standout Each One Win One), I could take the same logic one step sideways and say that in the evolution of indie music everything is additive, each breakthrough album contributing something to the distinct but ever-changing place of indie in pop culture.

Oneida have established their hipness through Leland’s regimen of anti-regimens, of additive (not derivative) appropriation and experimentation, and by consistently building on a discography that toys with the accidents of faulty copying. Oneida’s body of work doesn’t coyly insinuate phases and variation, but constantly and loudly reaffirms those things’ dominance over the band’s music. On this offering, the three Brooklynites continue their paradoxical tradition of change by displaying a trendiness that may ultimately add “relevant” or even “important” to the long list of adjectives used to describe them. The band have always been the holding of hands between kinda-Kyuss stoner rock and spazzy synth pop, but The Wedding is unique in that it is something conclusively Oneida but also conclusively marked of indie’s recent resurgence on the mainstream pop-cultural landscape.

The album’s a buffet of sounds, a mixtape in its own right. The crystalline chime of “Run Through My Hair” is one helium balloon away from being a Joanna Newsom song, “High Life” and “You’re Drifting” bleep and bloop out Postal Service electro-pop, and the bluesy “Spirits” and “Did I Die” swagger like Queens of the Stone Age. If you think The Wedding sounds like the ‘Staff Picks’ section at an independent music store, that’s exactly the point. Variety might not be an asset in itself, but such a genuine and enthusiastic reading of the band’s scene sure as hell is.

“The Eiger” opens the album with classic pop melody, a duo of cellos laying the groundwork for a sincere vocal line. But what makes it an Oneida song is how different it is from “Lavender,” the song it precedes, which is all straight beat, dynamic organ swells and dirty guitars. After an opener suggesting that if Secret Wars changed your life, maybe The Wedding will change it back again, “Lavender” is the sound of the band taking its place at the vanguard of indie rock. It’s fresh-faced and New York, and I can’t put it better than Marshall McLuhan when he said, “When a thing is current, it creates currency.”

But albums, especially those produced at Oneida’s prolific rate (seven albums in nine years, not including EPs and split singles) are rarely all bull’s-eyes and high-fives. “August Morning Haze” speaks for another Oneida tradition: the dodgy, hippy misstep. It’s a psychedelic melody that barely stands on its own two feet, sounding tacked on to the end of the album because it has that “last song on the album” feel to it. For a band every critic gives two scoops of kudos for its unabashed experimentation, “August Morning Haze’s” conformity to conventional album structure disappoints.

The band doesn’t come anywhere close to lyrical profundity, either. Though easily one of Oneida’s catchiest songs, “High Life” reassures us that “I would never tell a soul / that you finished my last bowl / I loved you then, I love you now / At least tonight.” By song’s end it resorts (albeit successfully) to a shout-out cycle of “Ahh-ahhhhh”s, a Gibbard-esque aching for crowd participation as used on Death Cab’s “Twentieth Century Towers” or “Transatlanticism.” If it’s elucidation you’re looking for, it wasn’t invited to the rehearsal space. The majority of the album’s lyrics remain too abstract or nonsensical to interpret, or they are obscured by the immediacy of the music and the mumbled delivery.

Still, there’s something to be said when complaining that the songs don’t mean anything comes across as trivial nitpicking. What The Wedding has to say, it says with sounds and style. As an endorsement of Oneida’s hipness, their relevance and importance to the indie rock scene, the album works. Ten years from now, when the next John Leland is writing the history of indie as style, he or she can start sifting through the romanticized one-album wonders and burnouts, or can pick up an Oneida record, look at the year on the back, and trust in the notion that they have in their hands a lovingly captured snapshot of what indie sounded like. Conrad Amenta :: 15 January 2006 |