Oneida
January 29th at the Market Hotel, Brooklyn, NY

Oneida’s recent album, Rated O, is an athletic feat to ingest all at once. At 113 minutes and change, the triple-CD/LP tests both the patience and aural fortitude of the devoted fan and casual listener alike. But fortunately, it’s largely a pleasure: one does not endure it so much as one indulges in it.

The same can be said of the live set that Oneida performed at Brooklyn’s Market Hotel last Friday night. Building slowly from a krautrock-inspired warble from the band’s wall of vintage keyboards, which they aligned onstage like a barricade (a literal wall of sound), Oneida plunged into their set and did not cease playing for nearly an hour and a half. Their only break: a huddle to decide which encores to play.

The performance felt arranged more along the lines of an evolutionary process than a set list. Passages of sound slowly, seamlessly, morphed into successive phases, as if guided by an unseen hand. A cloud of blips might lift to gradually reveal a shadowy, droning guitar. Those might then be overtaken by drummer Kid Millions’ lithely muscular beats. Millions, whose restraint from drumming for the first half of Oneida’s set caused palpable anticipation, exploded from behind his kit in the second half, a show unto himself.

Like a hard bop quintet armed with analog electric pianos and an eighth of mushrooms, Oneida’s music is diverse and engaging enough to satisfy fans of psychedelia, shoegaze, or electronica in a single deft swoop. But the most enticing aspect of the performance was its uniqueness. Given the band’s fondness for improvisation and excess, there’s no telling what the next Oneida show might hold, which is precisely why you should go.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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