Secret Wars may have been Oneida’s’ sixth album, but, when it dropped in early 2004, the shape of the multifarious avant-rock trio was still hard to discern. The group — Fat Bobby on electric organ, Hanoi Jane on bass and guitar and the irrepressible Kid Millions on drums (founding member Papa Crazee departed around 2002) – formed in Brooklyn’s industrial Williamsburg neighborhood in the late ’90s, part of a wave of scrappy bohemian artists drawn to the area by cheap rents and plentiful warehouse space. By 2004, this had all predictably cohered into a scene, with a plethora of provocative, extremely hip bands (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, Les Savy Fav) all inspired by post-punk and no wave, which ignited a swarm of trend-chasers, cool hunters, media blitzers, camp followers and real estate developers. Oneida had managed to take advantage of this hype, partly through propinquity and partly through their muscular, experimental and very loud music, which, though it traversed a wide range of styles from pungent noise-boogie to minimalist kosmische, could pass for post-punk in low light. An alignment with the venerable Rough Trade label in the U.K. produced some enviable cachet, and a 2002 split EP with Liars, Atheists, Reconsider, planted Oneida firmly in the zeitgeist, if perhaps on the outer edge rather than the white-hot center.
But Oneida has always been determined to march to their own corroded motorik beat. The album preceding Secret Wars, 2002’s Each One Teach One was an expansive double LP, originally released on vinyl only, full of monolithic repetition, overwhelming cascades of ego-death static and bleary, fuzzed-out fumbles at unstable bliss. The first track, infamous live staple “Sheets of Easter,” lasts 14 minutes and consists almost entirely of a single note. It was clear that Oneida was moving in a trippier, more unpredictable direction, one informed by older, then-uncool or obscure bands like Hawkwind, Silver Apples, the United States of America and even the (gasp) Grateful Dead. Hard as it may be to believe now, an elaborate vinyl release of music explicitly grappling with the fallout and detritus of the 1960s was, at the beginning of the 21st century, considered to be a pretty out-there idea.
Which may explain how Secret Wars turned out like it did. At eight songs in 40 minutes (with the last track taking up 14 minutes of that time), it’s an economical, if not a tidy, survey of Oneida’s ideas, propositions and fixations, densely compressed and loosely delivered. There’s a distinct feeling of a reset, or at least a recalibration. A couple tracks tap into the guerilla-Floyd vibe that the band cooked up on 2001’s Anthem of the Moon, built around Kid’s galloping, circular drums and Bobby’s slashing keys. But even the most bedrock of these forays into a “signature” Oneida sound — “Caesar’s Column” and “$50 Tea” — have been complicated, stepped on and tampered with. “Caesar’s Column” warps from a garage-synth Martian roadhouse brawl into a warbling, wobbling kind of underground gamelan, aided in large part by crucial gong work from Brooklyn artist and frequent collaborator Kayrock, while “$50 Tea” has a jittery, teeth-gritting clangor, driven by abrasive organ scrapes from Bobby and charbroiled guitar leads from Jane, who switched with a primitive alacrity between bass and guitar after Crazee left.
And as relatively streamlined as it may be, there are also a couple zone-out departure points that could have comfortably continued into the forever, like the live version of “Sheets of Easter”: the chanting intonation of the word “know” in “$50 Tea,” followed by the stuck-wash-cycle organ/guitar churn that ends the song, and the bell-tower chime of the single guitar chord that tolls throughout “The Winter Shaker.” That Oneida manages to indulge in these cavernous mantras in four-minute songs marks a significant evolution for the band; they’d found a way to fold space, fitting pockets of endlessness into a finite sonic field.
Secret Wars, for all its focus, also features its share of innovations. “Captain Bo Dignifies the Allegations With a Response” has the kinetic unruliness of Oneida’s more rock-oriented material, largely provided by punchy organ and droning bass, but in the middle it unexpectedly segues into a skipping, almost defiantly melodic chorus. “Pay no attention/ to the call of style/ too deaf to hear it!” the vocalist (all members sing, and it’s often hard to tell who’s who in this department), declares, a fitting rallying cry for a band that always stubbornly insisted on going its own way, even if that way splits in several directions simultaneously. “All I ever wanted/ was the mind of a child!,” the singer continues, with a tasty little double kickdrum beat at the verse break, maybe the sharpest pop moment in the Oneida arsenal (admittedly, there aren’t many). It’s another key Oneida tenet — the desire to approach the myriad and hidden wonders of the world with a commensurate sense of awe.
Meanwhile, “Wild Horses” looks back to the sticky, shag-carpet grooves of Oneida’s near-concept album, Come On Everybody Let’s Rock,” from 2000, but with a whole new layer of lank torpor slathered on that recalls Neil Young in the deepest, most molasses-covered of ditches. Perhaps the most impressive — and singular — song is “The Last Act, Everytime,” a full-blown hey-nonny-nonny hippie extravaganza with brittle, sitar-like guitar, an improbably fluttery vocal line and a vaguely South Asian melody. It blends the acoustic needlepoint of bucolic utopians the Incredible String Band with the manic euphoria of Veterans of Disorder-era Royal Trux. Rarely played live, it remains an intriguing road not taken for the band.
Reaction at the time was mixed, as is often the case with Oneida. Some critics were happy to see a return to tighter structures and more traditional forms; others lamented the loss of Each One Teach One‘s massive, hallucinatory sprawl. The British press, who’d been primed for another scruffy but sophisticated NYC band from the start, continued to be disappointed. “At best they sound like the Flaming Lips suffering some kind of terrible nervous breakdown,” a critic wrote in the Guardian, clearly at a loss for an applicable zinger. Stateside writers were kinder, for the most part appreciating the band’s attempt to marry abstruse experimentation to a brash, frontier mentality. “Oneida have finally given the world krautrock that actually rocks,” Spin magazine wrote, which shows how even the best esoteric European music was viewed with some degree of suspicion back in those benighted days. But there also appeared to be a definite sense that, instead of trying to expand their audience, Oneida was bent on narrowing it down, looking for only the truest of believers among the heathen multitudes, separating the wheat from the chaff.
Oneida briefly disrupted that trajectory with their next album, 2005’s The Wedding, which sweetened up their sound considerably, tinkering with orchestral pop textures and flowing, less abrasive rhythms. But by that point, the Williamsburg bubble had popped and the media spotlight had moved elsewhere. After this brief stab at gentility, Oneida embarked on an ambitious trilogy about families both blood and found, Thank Your Parents, and gradually became more abstract and austere, their jams becoming free and untethered to any genre. They’ve worked with composer Rhys Chatham and played duration-based pieces that lasted for several hours. As the band members have aged, Oneida’s frenetic creative pace has slowed, but they still sporadically tour and play out; their most recent album, the tuneful, even sunny Success, arrived in 2022, featured Yo La Tengo’s James McNew on one track, and marked a return to the brisk richness of Secret Wars, but with a more relaxed sensibility. Oneida used to be on the hunt for total transcendence or sweet oblivion — now they seem more than happy just to get together and have a little fun. After all this time, they may have found a secret peace.
