Oneida – Preteen Weaponry Album Review

I’ll admit it; I had no intentions of ever purchasing another Oneida disc. I love the band and would rank them as one of the country’s premiere psychedelic acts, but with eight full lengths (of which I own six), I pretty much figured I’d heard their entire bag of tricks. Their last album, 2006’s Happy New Year, was a largely hit or miss affair, bogged down with too much weirdo folksy balladry and not enough of the full on rock that made outings like Secret Wars and Anthem of the Moon essential.

I figured that as they got older, they’d continue to mellow with age, and I’d continue to lose interest. But then they pulled a complete 180 with Preteen Weaponry, and I’m more intrigued than ever.

Gone are the spazztastic keyboard heavy prog freakouts; they are replaced with three mutating, largely instrumental trance rock masterpieces, proving once and for all that in the realms of psychedelic art, sometimes the simplest shit ends up being the best. For all I know, they might have written and recorded the entirety of this disc in one practice, and the quality couldn’t be any higher. Fifteen minutes of hypnotic riffage bleeds into some of the most unholy keyboard wails ever committed to disc, only to fade into some mellower space rock transcendence that seems to linger forever. Yeah, obviously this is what Oneida should be doing.

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