While I usually find it distasteful, unintelligent, and generally lame to introduce into an album review the idea of getting one's money's worth out of a recording, limited run releases force the issue. These records are, after all, conceived with financial ends in mind — by only pressing 300 copies of a hand-packaged CD-R, for instance, all manners of drone-slop denizens and purveyors of prurience can use the force of scarcity to pressure their listeners into buying now and ultimately helping them make ends meet. If you want to avoid paying ungodly prices on eBay, you can't afford to download a couple of MP3s and wait a week or two to decide if a low-run release is worth buying. Nevermind biggie-sizing the next Wendy's meal — gotta drop that extra cash on the latest Wooden Wand 7" before it goes the way of the LP they sold out of a month ago.
Fortunately, there are enough copies of this split album around — 1,000 to be exact — to discourage hasty purchases. The to-buy-or-not-to-buy question is still unavoidable, but it's likely that anyone truly interested in this waxen disc will have an opportunity to buy it at a reasonable price. This allows us to relax a bit and treat the music within these grooves not as a curio or a trophy of ardent fanhood but as, well, music. And there's much here to reward us for such an undertaking.
Oneida hog the A side (appropriately, as this is, after all, the inaugural release on their own imprint) with what may very well be their most successful long-form piece to date. "Prehistoric Maze" veers away from the pratfalls that made "Hakuna Matata," the 14-minute drone 'n' throb closer to 2004's Nice/Splittin' Peaches EP, such an insufferable mess. This ten-and-a-half minute barnyard scuttle feels deliberate and well-wrought, even in its blurriest swaths of converging notes. It's easy to see why a number of critics have tagged this track Oneida-does-Sun City Girls: acoustic guitar, lute, and a small cavalry of miscellaneous stringed instruments twing and twang towards an elusive out-of-body experience, just as the brothers Bishop's shamanistic folk phrasings are at once fascinated with the rustic and earthen as well as the ephemeral and unattainable. But by the same token, "Prehistoric Maze" embodies more than just folk mysticism loosely tethered to the corporeal world. In its final minutes, it breaks free of its regimented pluck 'n' stomp and shifts into blissful lines of bleeding notes that resonate more like a computer-abetted pastoral soundscape from Hood or Four Tet. The music morphs into a melodic bath that aspires towards the sort of vibrant sunburst that graced the cover of the band's Each One, Teach One LP, giving itself over fully to sunkist pop textures. This resolution stands as yet another suggestion within Oneida's body of work that the band's project seems to be finding iridescence in the least likely corners of the rock aesthetic, and like all of the band's high points, "Prehistoric Maze" reaches a blinding vista without clumsy emotional overreach.
Reclusive big fuzz psych-sters Plastic Crimewave Sound's contribution aligns itself surprisingly closely with Oneida's, at least in spirit and effect. Both adored and derided as perhaps the ultimate tribute band, Plastic Crimewave Sound don't pussyfoot when it comes to giving voice to their influences. Their basslines pulse like those in Neu!'s and Can's locked-in classics, bong-hit vocalizations sneer and flail amidst cyclonic swirl a la Hawkwind, and guitar track upon guitar track creates a righteous melee on par with any great '70s arena-packer. As much as "End of Cloud" echoes acid rock's great forebears, though, it ends up in an entirely different place than, say, a typical Cream song. Like Oneida, Plastic Crimewave Sound are actually in pursuit of sheer, unadulterated, impressionistic bliss; their racing, shambolic onslaught works as an exhaustive (but never exhausting) pursuit of the Platonic psychedelic rock experience. The track is neither as experimental nor nihilistic as the songs with which it most openly converses, painting the personalities behind it not as mavericks in a grand tradition or claimants of a philosophical heritage, but as extremely zealous fans. Fans who can rock the fuck out in their own right, mind you, but nevertheless huge dorks with drawers full of vintage concert tees and obscure 45s. It's a celebration of the joys that the psych rock canon has brought to decades worth of equally ardent obsessives — and it's a celebration that gives this limited-run, decidedly idiosyncratic LP the air of ceremony and the bang-for-your-buck that such a release needs.
Fortunately, there are enough copies of this split album around - 1,000 to be exact - to discourage hasty purchases. The to-buy-or-not-to-buy question is still unavoidable, but it's likely that anyone truly interested in this waxen disc will have an opportunity to buy it at a reasonable price. This allows us to relax a bit and treat the music within these grooves not as a curio or a trophy of ardent fanhood but as, well, music. And there's much here to reward us for such an undertaking.
Oneida hog the A side (appropriately, as this is, after all, the inaugural release on their own imprint) with what may very well be their most successful long-form piece to date. "Prehistoric Maze" veers away from the pratfalls that made "Hakuna Matata," the 14-minute drone 'n' throb closer to 2004's Nice/Splittin' Peaches EP, such an insufferable mess. This ten-and-a-half minute barnyard scuttle feels deliberate and well-wrought, even in its blurriest swaths of converging notes. It's easy to see why a number of critics have tagged this track Oneida-does-Sun City Girls: acoustic guitar, lute, and a small cavalry of miscellaneous stringed instruments twing and twang towards an elusive out-of-body experience, just as the brothers Bishop's shamanistic folk phrasings are at once fascinated with the rustic and earthen as well as the ephemeral and unattainable. But by the same token, "Prehistoric Maze" embodies more than just folk mysticism loosely tethered to the corporeal world.
In its final minutes, it breaks free of its regimented pluck 'n' stomp and shifts into blissful lines of bleeding notes that resonate more like a computer-abetted pastoral soundscape from Hood or Four Tet. The music morphs into a melodic bath that aspires towards the sort of vibrant sunburst that graced the cover of the band's Each One, Teach One LP, giving itself over fully to sunkist pop textures. This resolution stands as yet another suggestion within Oneida's body of work that the band's project seems to be finding iridescence in the least likely corners of the rock aesthetic, and like all of the band's high points, "Prehistoric Maze" reaches a blinding vista without clumsy emotional overreach.
Reclusive big fuzz psych-sters Plastic Crimewave Sound's contribution aligns itself surprisingly closely with Oneida's, at least in spirit and effect. Both adored and derided as perhaps the ultimate tribute band, Plastic Crimewave Sound don't pussyfoot when it comes to giving voice to their influences. Their basslines pulse like those in Neu!'s and Can's locked-in classics, bong-hit vocalizations sneer and flail amidst cyclonic swirl a la Hawkwind, and guitar track upon guitar track creates a righteous melee on par with any great '70s arena-packer. As much as "End of Cloud" echoes acid rock's great forebears, though, it ends up in an entirely different place than, say, a typical Cream song. Like Oneida, Plastic Crimewave Sound are actually in pursuit of sheer, unadulterated, impressionistic bliss; their racing, shambolic onslaught works as an exhaustive (but never exhausting) pursuit of the Platonic psychedelic rock experience. The track is neither as experimental nor
nihilistic as the songs with which it most openly converses, painting the personalities behind it not as mavericks in a grand tradition or claimants of a philosophical heritage, but as extremely zealous fans. Fans who can rock the fuck out in their own right, mind you, but nevertheless huge dorks with drawers full of vintage concert tees and obscure 45s. It's a celebration of the joys that the psych rock canon has brought to decades worth of equally ardent obsessives - and it's a celebration that gives this limited-run, decidedly idiosyncratic LP the air of ceremony and the bang-for-your-buck that such a release needs.
1. Oneida - Prehistoric Maze
2. Plastic Crimewave Sound - End of Cloud