Listening to Oneida’s earliest material is a bit astounding. Frankly, the long-running Brooklyn psych band’s beginnings on Turnbuckle Records sound like the work of a different band; in some ways it even is, at least in that 1997’s A Place Called El Shaddai’s is the only Oneida record to sport the band members actual names (that, and the album was essentially just Pat Sullivan and Kid Millions plus whomever was guesting on each track).
I’m struck by the growth from El Shaddai’s to the “Best Friends” single, released one year later. Listening to El Shaddai’s now, it just sounds like a mess. Some of its tracks make me think of the tongue-in-cheek riff-rock the band would later explore on Come On Everybody Let’s Rock (albeit in embryonic form), but mostly El Shaddai’s sounds like a collection of ideas that hadn’t quite materialized into songs — only the restrained feedback spikes of “Go There” stick with me. Regardless, the Oneida credited on the “Best Friends” single — Kid Millions’ real name aside — was the core four-piece in place until Pat Sullivan’s departure in 2002. Comparatively, the single still sounds unique from the rest of Oneida’s discography, with a newfound cohesion that El Shaddai’s mostly lacked.
“The Land of Bugs,” embedded above, is the most quiet and reflective song that Oneida would issue until 2005’s The Wedding. The track opens with disorienting, echo-laced electronic sounds that give way to a hushed guitar line and a reflective, lightly spoken vocal, fading out with the lyric “I want to replace myself with you.” “Best Friends,” comparatively, is more indicative of where Oneida would develop for the next few years, with its big noise-rock dynamics marked by drum breaks and a wistful vocal hook. It’s a good track, but I spin the single’s b-side more often — something about how the lightly strummed guitar meshes with chiming harmonics hits, and Oneida have rarely sounded so introverted.
The sounds explored on this single were abandoned about as quickly as they’d been found — Oneida’s follow-up, Enemy Hogs, quickly shifts into a new phase for the band. As many Oneida fans would be quick to point out, however, that constant shift in creativity seems to be the point.