Oneida
Each One Teach One

Let's cut the crap, there are no other bands like Oneida.
And albums like this one, well, hardly any. Few, to be fair.

Instantly, a classic. Or an experience with a perverse aftertaste, a bit like slippery soccer. You have a ton of fun never quite understanding what the hell is happening, where the ball is going, and where you are in relation to the field. But the most absurd thing is that you experience your serious balance issues with the sensation that you could break your head at any moment (at worst a leg, an arm) and yet, you play.
The right adjective is: stubborn. Oneida are stubborn. And their music is a hallucinatory adventure made of sprains, fractures, and reiterations in clots of psychedelic sounds that grate neurons and scratch elbows.

Disc one.
Two tracks, a hypnotic assault of repeated frequencies pushed to the limit.
"Sheets Of Easter" is a tour de force and a question mark: can one repeat...no, "repeat" is not the most suitable term...can one HAMMER the word "light" on the same keyboard and guitar riff for 14 minutes and 13 seconds? Yes. Or rather, Oneida can do it. They do it. "Antibiotics" is a devastating bacchanal that brings out a riff that not even the best Suicide could, and dissects it for another 16 minutes; an obsessive crash between organ notes, feedback, and various mixtures of screeching guitars, with the drums zigzagging through time, jumping, pounding, rearranging, and messing everything up at will. You come back from the trip only to fall into it again.

Disc two.
The title track opens with a devastating agglomerate of blistering distortions, combustions, and noisy spins circling around three insistent piano notes.
From here onwards, the sound paroxysm between garage-glitch-noise, lopsided experimentalism à la Chrome, electronic krautrock reiterations worthy of the best Neu!, and melodic non-sense fractals like only Captain Beefheart. And a sensation of seemingly apparent chaos, just below the danger level, where "People of the North" seems like a 70s piece drowned in micro-synthetic organ licks and drum machine, "Number Nine" a disassembled and wobbling melodic suspension over metallic and grotesque chants released in psychedelic whirlpools by the drums, and "Black Chamber" a tear of tribal dances for puppets that boils chemicals at the bottom. "Each One Teach One" doesn't leave a single second to emptiness: a sonic matter stripped to the bone and then garnished with mixtures of piano drones, rough guitars, overflowing electronics, psychedelic mantras intertwined with debris of killer riffs, reverse tapes, loops, talk-over voices, rhythmic hypnosis. All of it, stubbornly hallucinatory.

I fear them. I still haven’t figured out exactly when (is there a right time?) to listen to them. This is the only original of their discography I have, and after 4 years of listening to it, I understood it the day before yesterday. Recently, I bumped my head.