Oneida
Happy New Year

"Happy New Year" by Oneida is a depressing album, yet it is a splendid one.

It's depressing because... well, just try! If after listening to it you don't feel sad, hopeless, and emotionally drained and dejected, well, maybe it's because you haven't listened to it properly!

It's splendid because it's a sequence of 11 (eleven) perfectly composed songs, with an arrangement inspired by classic rock, essential yet thick and robust, and a structure of the pieces that is attentive, balanced, and based on the form of the song - dare I say it? - pop.

After the noisy yet somewhat catchy beginnings of "Enemy Hogs" and "Come on Everybody Let's Rock", the band took a turn in "Each One Teach One" and "Secret Wars" towards a style focused on obsessive repetition, a repetition somewhat devoid of emotions and feelings that we would thus define as somewhat psychotic.

In "Happy New Year", things change because the songs convey a renewed humanity, marked, however, by deep sadness and melancholy. Almost to exorcise this sense of disorientation and misfortune, many songs, starting with the first one, "Distress", resemble liturgical chants, litanies where the harmonizations of multiple voices soothe and make one forget suffering and disorientation. Religious singing seems to be one of the main sources of inspiration for this album.

Exceptions to the prevailing mood include the third track, "Adversary", characterized by a lively pace, and partly the following one, "Up With People", with a rocking rhythm, which seems to want to guide us through a threatening sea. The lyrics go

"Sunlight shines on the top of the trees
The highest hills bring the sweetest breeze
You've got to get up to get free

Open your eyes, the things you see
are determined by the height of the ground you seize
You've got to get up to get free"

as if participating in their profane liturgy were necessary to reach a freer state of existence. But it's not the case to trust it.

The album closes with "The Misfit", perhaps the most beautiful song on the album, where a soothing bass line gently rocks us towards perdition and "Thank your parents", characterized by an almost funeral march and whose lyrics allude to the nefarious effects of a psychedelic trip

"Dream another color
'Till you dream no more" .