Ever since their epic 2002 song "Sheets of Easter", Oneida seem to evoke something wild and transcendent in the press and the minds of their fans. Eager listeners await each release, ready to have their minds expanded and bodies exhausted, but the band has spent the past few years subtly changing course. After nearly perfecting their distinctive groove on 2004's Secret Wars, the following year's The Wedding was concise, diverse, and often gorgeous, while 2006's Happy New Year felt tentative and even somber (save for a few monster tracks like "Up With People"). Time has proven these records all fascinating and rewarding in their own right, and this year brings another surprise from the band: an album that's not only nearly all-instrumental, but all one track.
Or so they claim. It's not quite one long song, as it's divided into three distinctly different ones with track breaks, though they do flow together fairly gracefully. Whatever fans expected, Preteen Weaponry is neither a definitive statement nor some sort of a Herculean display of ability. It's simply another example of a band that never tires of challenging itself, and nearly always rises to the occasion.
As the first track begins, the drums play loose fills around the edges of the beat, a faraway pulse of guitar keeps the time, and garbled wah-addled noise fills the mid-ground. But as the track comes into focus, the instruments start to discern themselves, the drums take hold of a sophisticated but primal groove, and Oneida start to jam. The layering of sound in this first segment, and how subtly it shifts, is striking: Primal grooves evaporate into faint whispers, inscrutable noise becomes a foundation for sparse and clean guitar notes, then acoustic guitars and incidental organ tones lighten the atmosphere. Divert your attention for more than a minute and you'll forget where the song had just been, and how it got to its present state.
In the second segment, guitars squeal over bowel-shaking bass with sluggish, almost ceremonial drumming. Its one chord is stretched and teased until high and lilting vocals finally kick in, almost chanting, and the guitars scrape and squiggle like a pickup's engine in its last throes. All that fades into the background once the third track kicks off when a few laser-like tones come in and the song shifts to a major key.
Oneida's love of repetition gets them saddled with more than a few krautrock tags, and drummer Kid Millions' work on the final track could actually fit in on a Can or Neu! record. That said, the rhythm is still irregular and askew, with Millions nonchalantly dropping beats as the melody whizzes around him. Soon, all the members intermittently drop in and out of the mix, almost dub-like in the segment's final minutes, as the band begins to use the studio as another instrument. Even if Preteen Weaponry is one more left turn out of many in the band's catalog, it nonetheless reaffirms what makes Oneida stand out: How they take something so endlessly parroted and tempered as psychedelic rock and stretch it, with equal parts discipline and abandon, into something more artistic and, more importantly, unique.
