In 2005, Onedia were already calling themselves squares now they’re squares deep into their 40s, their hip old nexus long gone. None of these old-city references smack of nostalgia, though. The righteous guitar jam collapses into a sweaty mess, a festival for chaos. They pull that link until it snaps during the finale, “Solid,” an electrifying rock song about trying not to fall apart. On opener “Beat Me to the Punch,” Oneida start tugging at a New York thread that begins with the Ramones for the next six songs, it runs through Television, No Wave bedlam, and Sonic Youth into Oneida’s own devil-may-care scene of ecstatic improvisation in Brooklyn. There is also the lingering sense that Success is an ode to a bygone New York, before fresh development and infrastructure investments curbed wildness and danger. Even “Paralyzed,” the album’s 11-minute escapade into oblivion, pulses with strobe-light intensity, the beat relentless as synthesizers and guitar pedals unfurl around it in a complex duet. “I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand”-a lurid love song for these weird times-suggests jangle-pop launched from a slingshot, sheets of feedback howling like the wind as it rushes past. “Opportunities” explodes through a scrim of abrasive guitars, the band bounding forward like Superchunk begging to be punched harder squiggling electronics chase Bobby Matador’s hook without distracting from it. Remember how good it felt when you finally got to see old friends, to celebrate having lived long enough to reunite? That’s the spirit that animates these songs, as though Oneida decided not to wait around for another session that might never come. When they reconvened to record after a year and a half, they didn’t bother with excessive experimentation or studio chicanery. As lockdowns grew, Oneida scrapped a session scheduled for March 2020 the sequestered members spent the next 15 months writing a glut of new material. This pause and the resulting atavism stem from a now-familiar storyline-the pandemic. On Success, Oneida get back to the very basics of being a rock band, just buttressed by the experience and finesse of exploring some of rock’s wildest reaches since the late ’90s. This relative concision doesn’t mean Oneida have forsaken their trademark eccentricity-shards of contorted guitar squeeze into punk shout-alongs, while layers of outbound synthesizers lurk beneath Kid Millions’ mighty drums. Eschewing the overabundance of epics like Rated O or the massive canvases of A List of the Burning Mountains, Success squeezes seven songs into 41 minutes, with only one track breaking the double-digit mark. Unfussy, fun, and occasionally even funny, it is also their most purely pleasurable album in nearly two decades. Success is Oneida’s first album since 2018’s sprawling Romance, capping the longest gap in their catalog. After 25 years, Oneida continue to do what they always have-that is, exactly what they want. Other jobs, other bands, other relationships: Oneida’s five steady members have pursued it all during the last decade, reconvening occasionally to make madcap albums for which the word “psychedelic” feels too soft. But when gentrification claimed that space in 2011, too, Oneida’s feverish output slowed to the rather adult pace of a record every three or so years.
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