Over the last month or so, the second installment in Oneida's "Thank Your Parents" trilogy Rated O, has been discussed about around the blogosphere. Hell, everything nowadays is. Pitchfork wrote about it (well not much but they hyped it), my bud Anthony Fantano from The Needle Drop reviewed a track, and there are some other places I've heard about this but I just can't put my finger on them.
I'm a pretty big fan of Oneida. I think I knew what was expected of this album. The majority of Oneida's albums are considered "epic". I loved their 2002 release Each One Teach One, minus the first disc. Why didn't I like the first disc? It consisted of two tracks: "Sheets of Easter" and "Antibiotics". "Sheets of Easter" is the perfect song to use when you're daring your friend to listen to its 14 minutes of repetition. "Antibiotics" was alright but its weakness was progression. It's a little tiring listening to the same keyboard riff for 16 minutes.
I knew that since this was part of the series, it would have very extensive psychedelic rock jams. What I didn't know was that these psychedelic rock jams would be more of an endurance test for me. I forgot to mention this was a 3-disc set. That's right, 3 CDs. The album was nearly two hours long. A small portion of it is decent, but just a lot of it was just pointless jamming. Take out about 3/4 of the album and you got yourself a decent Oneida record. Maybe this was intentional; maybe Oneida wanted to make a filler album to go in between the two other parts of Thank Your Parents. A perfect example of a useless track is "O" off the final disc, it has nearly no progression or meandering whatsoever. All it really is is just clicky noises being made for 12 minutes.
If you're a prog-rock fanboy, then yeah, I recommend picking this up. If you're not, I wouldn't really want you to waste your time. If you're a first-time listener of Oneida, I suggest picking up Anthem of the Moon or their split with Liars.
I need to dive deeper into this LP and review it. Thanks for the bump. I'm not sure what to make of it yet. I know a few tracks have stood out so far, but I feel like Oneida can rely a little too much on the relentless noise of their music. There are a lot of subtleties, and I like that in my music, but I'd like to hear them actually add some real, definitive changes to some of their songs. I feel like that would add a lot of replay power to the tracks, and keep the songs interesting from afar as well as close up.
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