ONEIDA – The Wedding
(Rough Trade)

As well as being a devotee of Oneida’s hypnotic rhythmic jams, I also count myself a fan of the trio’s song-writing, and would contest that the shorter, weirder, poppier compositions on their albums have provided just as many highlights as the more frequently praised mammoth freak-outs.

So, when word reaches me that Oneida have decided to alienate the less open-minded of their followers by recording a self-proclaimed “baroque pop extravaganza”, my natural reaction is; Yes! Bring it the fuck on!! If there’s one band on earth I implicitly trust to take whatever creative left turns they please and still unquestionably rock it into the highest realms, it is Oneida.

So here it is. It’s called ‘The Wedding’- what a title! It’s heading straight for my CD player. Expectations are soaring.

First Listen, here goes :-

Begins with lavish strings and the lyrics “pretty little German girl / the Eiger is a whole wide world” before progressing through a breathless series of overblown volkish fairytale imagery which recalls the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band in it’s unhinged, Arcadian creepiness... This isn’t as complete a transformation as I’d been led to expect – ‘Lavender’ is classic Oneida…. here comes what sounds like a mutant accordian and more lyrics about forests and winter days... “the old men love me while I braid my pubic hair” – are they taking the piss?? ... a dense and ominous haze pulled from the echoes of the folky interludes on early Grateful Dead albums... more faux-medieval song construction with acid rock guitar... now an uneasy combo of lute and a really bad drum machine ... ‘High Life’ is startlingly different – clean-toned ‘80s style synths predominate, while the band emote madly in full anthemic pop mode like nervous bedroom New Romantics… worryingly patchy, lo-fi sound mix going on here… ‘Did I Die’ kicks our expectations in the ass once again - some kind of drug-fucked, hair metal nightmare rock being boiled down into a free-folk jam...Now early Suicide keyboards, more breathless lighters-in-the-air vocals, lyrics about castles and coastgurards... ‘Charlemagne’ offers faded-glamour, morning-after electro-pop.. suggests the beginnings of a mini-pop symphony when violin and throbbing bass enters, but it’s over in about two minutes... ‘Know’ almost sounds like Mercury Rev re-recording something off the Magnetic Fields ’69 Love Songs’… arrangements are weird, lyrics are absolutely beautiful... it also fails to reach the two minute mark... Now a surly electro-Sabbath drone/stomp with vocals like a lost, freaked out metal singer crying out from limbo, but here comes a soup of startling, fragmentary, implacable sounds.. mildly magnificent... yet more heavily sustained, overlapping guitar and organ textures.. there may be a lot less rhythm going on than previous Oneida records, but there’s a lot more pure droning.. Ominous scrapes of feedback haunt ‘The Beginning is Nigh’, before some powerful Kid Millions drumming marks the genesis of a slow building, uphill march toward a mighty sonic battle – the album’s longest, darkest and perhaps most impressive track methinks! Closing track ‘August Morning is Haze’ is also impressive... more malign lute abuse... suggests the confusion of shimmering West Coast pop relocated to the benighted realms of a chill, Northern European winter. End.

Well bloody hell. That was quite an experience.

Third or fourth listen – I think I’m ready to formulate some kind of an opinion.

First off, let me say I’m sad to report this isn’t really the towering, mercurial baroque pop masterpiece I’d been anticipating. For all its laudable ambition to break them into a whole new sphere, ‘The Wedding’ comes across as perhaps Oneida’s patchiest and least immediately successful album to date. In particular, their stabs at pure pop seem cautious and fragmentary - instead of gorgeous domes of musical nectar, many of the songs seem short and underdeveloped, with a stark, hurried sounding mix – they sound almost like demos (though demos of some pretty strong and startling compositions, admittedly).

Meanwhile, the album’s full moon shines brightest when the band return to what they do best – overwhelming lysergic folk reveries and a dense, malignant psychedelic brew that’s genuinely evocative, sounding like skeletal viking armies rising from the waves to terrorise coastal villages whilst moon-mad pagan children cavort naked amid the standing stones. It’s in this aspect of the album that the full-scale awesomeness I was expecting can most readily be found.

This is also, without question, a very STRANGE album indeed. The short songs, the deranged, imagistic lyrics, and constant, jarring shifts of tone, instrumentation and atmosphere – all this serves to create a baffling, chaotic listening experience, as Oneida’s wild-eyed intensity, deprived of it’s more customary outlet in single-minded teutonic jamfests, is channelled into an almost ADD-afflicted pillaging of mutant song constructions, weird noises and wildly divergent notions of where individual tracks, let alone the album as a whole, should be heading.

Nevertheless though, I love this album, and I’m glad they made it. Only fools want to listen to ‘perfect’ records all day, and I’m sure the rest of us would agree that there are times when magnificent failures like this one are where it’s at. I haven’t yet had a chance to undertake the kind of heavy listening sessions that appreciation of an album like this demands, but now that my initial trepidation has worn off, I feel confident that hidden within the lunatic grooves of ‘The Wedding’ are more riotous, sublime mysteries than any other album I’ll hear this year. The all-pervading medieval atmosphere and the fact that the only love songs seem to focus on desperate rejection suggests that the marriage Oneida have in mind is still more alchemical than mundane in nature, and long may it remain so. Strange is good – like, obviously.