Oneida - Rated O

By now, fans of Oneida’s boundless, genre-hopping excursions into hypnotic repetitive noise will know not to expect anything less than the unexpected. Over the space of ten studio albums, they’ve experimented with quarter-hour exercises in repeating the same note over and over again (‘Sheets Of Easter’) to more recent melodic affairs as heard on 2005 LP ‘The Wedding’.

But even die-hard fans of this already highly prolific Brooklyn four-piece might question the task of having to wade through a triple album of new material. What’s more, this is only the second part in a trio of albums set to be released under the ‘Thank Your Parents’ trilogy, perhaps dulling the fanfare of yet another new Oneida release a tad.

Nevertheless, austerity and restraint were never high on Oneida’s agenda, and the sheer sprawl of these three discs let the band indulge in an orgy of sound, revisiting previous stomping grounds as well as bringing in new ideas along the way.

The first disc kicks off, not with a squall of electric guitars, but with a digitally distorted ragga beat that could easily have been taken from The Bug’s ‘London Zoo’ album of last year. The track, ‘Brownout in Lagos’, is a sheer departure, even for Oneida, heralding in the most adventurous of the three discs. It’s also the most electronic and abrasive third of ‘Rated O’, with ‘10.30 at the Oasis’ skipping into infinity like a damaged copy of Daft Punk’s ‘Discovery’ while the ‘Story Of O’ invites Hell-sent motorik bulldozers to scrape around the stereo for eight minutes. Some will revel in the micro-cyclic chaos while many others will end up reaching for the Anadin, but then that’s Oneida’s wont and always has been.

After the first disc, we return to the more familiar territory of blues-y space rock, the kind visited on albums like 2004’s ‘Secret Wars’. And while it may not be a huge movement on the stylistic battlefield, the tracks hold their own in the Oneida catalogue, with an encore of two epic dirges taking up most of disc three.

Considering the whole affair actually lasts a fairly palatable two hours (the necessity of three discs apparently justified by the different aspects of the band’s sound), ‘Rated O’ could well be considered the quintessential Oneida album. If not, then at least you’re getting several good bangs for your buck.

6/10