The latest from Brooklyn psych/punk voyagers Oneida spices rock ‘n’ roll minimalism with some experimental condiment choices. Catching the band in mischievous high spirits, Expensive Air picks up what previous album Success put down and makes a run for the corner of the block cackling madly.
In similar vein to ‘I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand’, first single ‘Here It Comes’ is another lost pop gem. A garage sale treasure hidden away in a crumpled, sun damaged, sleeve. Waiting for you to arrive. It clatters forward joyfully, lost in its own momentum, awash with gloriously out of tune keyboards, wrong in all the right ways. It sounds like a younger band, weightless with the possibility of making music together, not buried under a quarter century of brow furrowing art-muso-seriousness.
Success came after a four year pause. Drummer Kid Millions had a car accident to recover from, the world had Covid to deal with. It’s unclear how these events figure and it might be overkill to claim they are reborn but the band is certainly recharged for the break. Off the back of the more tightly structured songs on Success this next batch have spent a little longer getting scuffed and stretched by the band. They’re in a fun mood, leaning into their more punk instincts. ‘La Plage’ is a summer fun hype jam for uncomplicated good times riding a sturdy bass rumble and a stray Dead Kennedys riff, spouting multi-lingual babble at the beach. There’s even a nod to ‘Ça Plane Pour Moi’ in case it wasn’t clear enough.
With most songs keeping uncharacteristically close to the three minute model it’s the album’s first and last tunes that stretch out a little. ‘Reason To Hide’ kicks things off with B-movie synth wails and an irresistible rattling propulsion. I mean this in the best possible way, it sounds like some lost midpoint of Hawkwind and The Fall. At the other end much comes into focus as we reach the final tune ‘Gunboats’, which is a Swell Maps cover. The play it pretty faithfully too.
Much eulogised as a cult band it still sometimes feels as if the Maps have only partly been given their due, regarded mistakenly as some sort of rock ‘n’ roll savants, as if Nikki Sudden’s songs bubbled to the surface accidentally amid chaos and general dicking about. This is only partly true. ‘Gunboats’ is from their debut A Trip To Marineville an album which opens with the chanted chorus “Do you believe in art?” Of course Oneida would love the Swell Maps, fellow adopters of comical stage names, serious but playful, lo-fi surveyors of uncharted territories, discoverers of hidden back routes connecting rock ‘n’ roll through krautrock and musique concrète to punk, bedroom diviners of the lightning that hits the bottle.
