Because parts of Brooklyn, NYC have culturally exploded to serve as an East Coast counterpoint to Portland, OR as the USA’s epicenter and incubator of all that is gratingly and ephemerally hip, it might be hard to remember that this phenomenon (and the shockingly rapid gentrification that followed quickly behind it) is a very recent development, and that it really wasn’t so long ago that the Brooklyn scene was not only nonexistent, but the very idea that there could be such a thing seemed unrealistic. Before 2000-2001ish, when bands like The Rapture, Radio 4, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Liars made Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood synonymous with a jagged and exciting post-punk revival, there was basically only Oneida.
Drummer Kid Millions and organist Bobby Matador moved to Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill area in 1996, and with guitarists Hanoi Jane and Papa Crazee, they began, in relative isolation, to explore a “psychedelic” music that was pretty much free of typical psych rock tropes—as Millions put it in a generously in-depth conversation, “We want to make something damaged, like an actual psychedelic trip. What does ‘psychedelic’ in music even mean, tape echo on a tambourine?”
We had a bunch of different interests musically, like Krautrock, the Nuggets comps. We were into experimental punk like Pere Ubu because Bobby went to Oberlin and did a thesis on Cleveland punk, so he was aware of everything below the Pere Ubu tip of the iceberg. We were into glam, which was VERY uncool at the time, and we were coming across crates of electro records that were just left on the street in our neighborhood, like all these 12”s of Afrika Bambaataa and that kind of thing. And all that kind of—it wasn’t until the Brooklyn thing exploded that we realized that other people were into this stuff, and a lot of it, you’re not necessarily going to hear in what we do, but it’s all there.
Williamsburg, in terms of being hip, it was just a block near the Bedford train stop. There was a good Thai restaurant, there was EarWax records, which has moved since. There weren’t any venues except for the Charleston, which was a shitty gig, but it was the only game in town, so we did a lot of DIY shows, we played these parties at a few spots. Wolfy [pseudonym of poster artist Jef Scharf] introduced us to the people at Good/Bad, an art collective in Williamsburg closer to the Lorimer stop, but there was really nothing else there. A few years after we started to play around doing DIY shows, this made me laugh—the first time I came out of the L stop and saw somebody busking, it seemed like the dumbest thing I’d ever seen and I thought “wow, we’re fucked!” And then the other thing was when Northsix [now known as Music Hall of Williamsburg] first opened we refused to play there because we just did DIY shows, we didn’t want to play clubs. They got really upset and accused us of not supporting the scene, but if you walked towards the river from Bedford towards Kent, as soon as you stepped off of Bedford, it was desolation! Nobody was walking around, nobody was there, it was completely empty of people. When we were doing some of our earliest press photos the photographers said “we need to figure out a really dramatic photo” so we said well fuck, we could just burn a couch in the middle of the street, that’s what it was like!
When we started, there was no rock scene in New York City. There were no good rock bands, there was just sort of a hangover scene of what was left after New York bands like Girls Against Boys and Skeleton Key were being signed to major labels. New Jersey had Yo La Tengo, but, and I’ve said this before, but when we’d say, onstage, that we were from Brooklyn, people would laugh, it was so uncool to admit that you lived in Brooklyn. And by the time the post-punk thing started happening in Brooklyn, with bands like Liars, we were on our fifth album.
That album, Each One Teach One not only crested with the Williamsburg wave, it made the band notorious. It opened with two songs, “Sheets of Easter” and “Antibiotics,” both of which surpass 14 minutes in length, and which use repetition to defiant levels. “Easter,” for almost its entire duration, is a one-note riff and a one-word lyric (“You’ve got to look into the light light light light light light light…”), and it would have probably come off like they were just fucking with people if the song weren’t so goddamn glorious. To this day it still feels like a treat when they bust it out in concert.
You don’t HAVE to listen to the whole thing. We understand it’s not for everybody.
Oneida were, for a long time, ferociously prolific. Though they lost Papa Crazee to the folk-rock band Oakley Hall, they gained, for a time, Trans Am/Golden/Fucking Champs guitarist Phil Manley, and they’re now a five-piece with synthesist Barry London and former Ex-Models guitarist Shahin Motia. Through all these transitions, they managed to release an album of consistently high quality every year or two from 1997 to 2012. Millions became a promiscuous moonlighter, in his own percussion project Man Forever (their last album, Play What They Want features contributions from Laurie Anderson), with Ex-Models, with London in the wonderful Jäh Division which is exactly what you’re thinking, and with Matador in a duo called People of the North. On top of all that, the band curated the Brah Records label for Jagjaguwar, releasing excellent albums by Pterodactyl, Parts & Labor, and Sightings. But since 2012, save for a collaborative album with seminal No-Wave figure Rhys Chatham, there’ve been a few Oneida singles and that’s that. That finally changes this year, when the band releases Romance.
This is something you always read about with bands, it was just like families and time restrictions and the fact that we didn’t have our own studio anymore, so it was just hard to push it across the finish line. We used to be SO ORGANIZED, and we still are, but our lives overwhelmed the machine. We didn’t even know what happened, it was like fuck, really, six years? We did release singles and EPs and a live record, but nobody really like clocks that stuff, so I think it just became this impossible…. Oh, and the other thing that’s a bit misleading is that the Rhys Chatham record was handed in a couple of years before it got released. The label didn’t even respond for an entire year, it was just silence, and we’re busy people so we just said “Well, whatever, fuck it.” So we DID complete that, but yeah, nonetheless, Oneida used to be very much focused on generating albums, and we hit a wall.
Romance has been in process for years, so some of the tunes are older. We didn’t pull a Neil Young and drag old tunes out of the early years or anything, it was constantly being worked on, it was just really fuckin’ slow. It may have been too slow, it maybe didn’t need to be as slow as it was, but sometimes when you’re younger and you’re making things you don’t even know how hard it’s going to be and you just keep going, unaware of all the struggles and production management you need to maintain, and the the fierce focus. But for me, I am middle aged now and time just goes by more quickly! To my mind Romance came out a year after the last one! [laughs]
Being a collection of six years worth of ideas, Romance sometimes feels like it could be a best-of—every sound on it feels fully of a piece with the band’s long running program of rock deconstruction. It meanders back and forth from electronic experiments to the band’s more familiar rock sounds, and per Millions, that’s by design.
There were a lot of sessions we did to create this album, some of which were stern, minimal electronic beds that Bobby, Barry and Shahin would create, then I’d get the track and play over it—it’s like painting, which is a metaphor that’s been used a lot before, but it was that kind of a process of editing it down, rebuilding it, listening, and seeing what stuck. We had a couple of albums before this that were pretty freeform and experimental, in a way that we loved, but it was cool to come back from that while still applying some of those ideas to songs, which was something we wanted to do, so we did intentionally push that way.
Romance’s release date is March 9, 2018, but on January 23rd, Oneida released to YouTube the track “All In Due Time,” which pairs Millions’ signature This-Heat-as-endurance-test drumming against spacey keyboards, rubber band guitar, and a vocal that for all the world reminds me (and I realize I might very well be utterly alone in hearing this) of Stump’s Mick Lynch in a more subdued moment. Today, they’re releasing “Good Lie,” and it’s Dangerous Minds’ privilege to be premiering it for you. The song features a rare vocal turn from guitarist Hanoi Jane, and synths and drum modules hand-built by synthesist Barry London.
Bonus! Here’s Oneida playing one of my favorite tunes at one of my favorite venues—”Up With People” from 2006’s Happy New Year, at the Beachland Tavern with Yo La Tengo’s James McNew guesting on bass.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Dub Will Tear us Apart’: Jäh Division, the gimmick band that transcendeth all
The drummers from Oneida, Yo La Tengo and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs really tore it up on Record Store Day
The peerlessly weird Beefheartian post-punk of Stump