PSYCH 101

[August 4th, 2004] Psychedelic music's timetable is as predictable as the musicians making it are not. Blame it on the drugs, but every 20 years rock gives birth to a band or two so original they knock the wind out of music for another two decades...like clockwork. Brooklyn's Oneida is the latest in this unwieldy lineage, sawing off hard-edged hallucinations and punching listeners in the gut with psych's latest round of freak-outs.

"It's still really easy to put out weird-ass music that alienates people," explains the band's keysmasher-vocalist Fat Bobby.

Psychedelic music has been alienating people from its beginnings over 40 years ago. But the band isn't rote acid reproduction. Rather it has released three of the most head-spinningly original and off-the-hinges psychedelic albums ever put to tape.

Sadly, the band's brilliance is matched only by its sheer lack of notoriety. Since forming in 1997, Oneida has become one of those bands many have heard of but few know anything about. And you can't know anything about Oneida unless you know something about psychedelic music. So a short history lesson is in order.

Beginning in the '60s, the goal of psych bands was to perceive the world on a different plane of existence, usually with the help of LSD. Texas crackpots 13th Floor Elevators claimed to have invented the term "psychedelic" with a manifesto for hippies everywhere on their brilliant album, The Psychedelic Sounds of... .

Across the pond, Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd were holding all-night freak-outs in swinging London. Like their American counterparts, Floyd blew open the possibilities of guitar-based rock with a bathtub full of acid and a spaceship full of extraterrestrial sounds.

"Psych is a process of changing your perspective," says Bobby. "In the '60s, it was all about opening your mind and looking at different perspectives."

That perspective and spirit crashed during the Reagan years, when psychedelic music began sprouting new fluorescent flowers. This time the music came in a harder, noisier package. And once again, a group of drug-gobbling Texans lit the way.

Hailing from San Antonio in the early '80s, the Butthole Surfers were horrific, menacingly clever and abnormal. The band took a piss on hippie mysticism and focused on the scabbed underbelly of drug use and rock.

Mirroring the first wave of psych, England delivered a Rosemary's Baby of its own. Started in 1982, Spacemen 3 built songs around trance-inducing drones, hard-drug imagery and tsunami squalls of noise.

Now Oneida has fused the noise of the '80s and the experiments of the '60s with post-millennial freak-outs, creating a kick-in-the-crotch Frankenstein monster of psychedelia.

The band's songs can go from Kraut-like repetitions, turning gray brain matter red hot, to kooky psych-pop more colorful than a Skittles factory. Each album is a druggy interpretation of the Oneidans' psych-music forefathers, snared together with their own inside-out intelligence. In the process, the band has created an entirely new breed of psychedelic music.

"If you want to call us psych, I hope it's because we're all about energy and turning colors into sound," insists Bobby.

The band's first three records saw it searching for direction and are fairly unremarkable. Somewhere between the tongue-in-cheek riffage of Come on Everybody Let's Rock and the next album, the band found the perfect prescription of narcotic influence and musical bombast. Oneida's next three albums, Anthem of the Moon, Each One Teach One and 2004's Secret Wars, have created a solid steel consistency unmatched by their peers.

These albums explode in a spectrum of texture equally influenced by acid hits and analog synths. The band's sound is scrambled by hot-rodded keyboards, sounding like a Wurlitzer and a Moog doing it doggy-style. Like a little brother sprinting to keep up, the guitar fills in the hallucinogenic holes.

"To us [psychedelia] means experimental in a not necessarily cerebral way," says Bobby. "Some people say we're avant-garde. [But] there's not a lot of high concept that goes into it. What we do is instinctual."

It's those cleaver-sharp instincts that have vaulted Oneida miles ahead of other bands. It's been a long 20-year wait for a new birth in the twisted family of psychedelic rock, but it has proven a quick student and a wiser teacher with its loopy genius for reinventing the music.