With eight stellar albums to their name and quite possibly the best live show in modern indie rock, it's something of a puzzle that Brooklyn's Oneida has yet to really break into the glare (dim and fickle as it is) of hipster stardom. On the other hand, the diversity and sheer uniqueness of their body of work ensures the band's resistance to the kind of labelling and pre-packaging so essential to the large-scale shifting of units. Ever willing to experiment, Oneida's albums encompass the rhythmic minimalism of krautrock, the beefiness of 70's hard rock, and the sunny paranoia of 60's psychedelia, all without falling into textbook gestures or retro influence-worship. Indeed, there's hardly a band at work today that manages to sound as consistently fresh and inventive as Oneida: despite veering between wispy medieval love chants, witty noise blurts, frantic dance numbers, and eye-shakingly heavy trance jams, the Oneida sound is as immediately recognizable as it is difficult to properly describe.

Their newest album, Happy New Year, is probably the band's most focused and fully-realized effort to date, despite its turbulent genesis. The album was originally planned as a three-record set entitled Thank Your Parents, but after receiving the news that their beloved studio space, Sunset Grill, was going to be bulldozed to make way for a shopping center and luxury condos, they had to re-think their plans. Recorded with a wealth of friends and guest stars, Happy New Year is a salute to the Brooklyn community that has sustained Oneida for the past five years, a farewell to their old stomping grounds, and a christening for their brand-new studio, The Ocropolis, and their newest member, Phil Manley of The Fucking Champs (who, in order to fit in with Oneida's Fat Bobby, Hanoi Jane, and Kid Millions, has been affectionately dubbed Double Rainbow). Fat Bobby wants it to be entirely clear, though, that a triple album is still on the way.

"Oh, we're still going to do the triple album," he tells me over the phone. "That's something that we do - we'll have a goal or a vision, and we'll work on it without getting too obsessed with it having to be the 'next' thing. Our last album, The Wedding - that was an idea we had back in 2000. We started recording it in the middle of 2001. So the album we put out last year was the result of four years of work, during which time we also put out a couple other records. It's totally cool with us to have an idea or a goal and just pursue it at the pace that makes sense. So yeah, this record that's coming out now, it's a different entity ? it's not like a one-disc version of Thank Your Parents."

Oneida are also fortunate in being signed to Jagjaguwar Records, a label open-minded enough to stand by anything that the band wants to do - even if the band wants to start their own record label, which was the case with the founding of Brah Records, a cooperative venture between Oneida and Jagjaguwar that was started when ex-Oneida member Papa Crazee couldn't find a home for his new band, the rootsy (and criminally underexposed) Oakley Hall. One drunken phone call from Fat Bobby to Chris Swanson (Jagjaguwar's label head) and the next morning, Oneida found themselves "curators" of their own imprint. Bobby has nothing but praise for Jagjaguwar: "We don't do business with people that we don't like and that we don't respect, which is why we've stuck with Jagjaguwar records here in the States for so long. They're an incredible combination of communalism and totally above-board forthrightness and good business sense."

He's equally enthusiastic about Jagjaguwar's signing of Vancouver bands: Black Mountain, and more recently, Ladyhawk. "Whenever anyone has considered pitching anything to Jagjaguwar, we have nothing but good things to say about it," he enthuses. "Those labels - Jagjaguwar and Secretly Canadian - they were tiny, nobody knew them. And they've built a world through being fucking righteous, which is pretty rare. I mean, I know there are other indie labels that have done the same thing and have provided models for that, but it's cool. Community is super important to us. And I feel that we've built a community."

That said, it's taken Oneida seven or eight years to get this far, and while they've got a much higher profile now than when they debuted, they're hardly in a position to quit their day jobs. One wonders, are they still as stoked about making music together. Bobby's response is unequivocal: "Totally. I think part of that is that we all have other things in our lives. We play music with other people, I teach History and English to eighth-graders, Jane is a social worker. It's important to have something else so that, when you're feeling creatively bereft, it's like, boom!, I have something else that matters to me, I have another way of existing, I have other people to talk to and think about. And I think that's kinda what screws some bands. Sure, if you go on tour for ten months a year and you play 250, 300 shows, you're gonna get big, quick, but what are you going to write songs about? Bein' on the road? Don't get me wrong, there's some great being-on-the-road songs, no doubt, but why limit yourself? You know? Pack as much in as you can. I'm not that young anymore, but I'm still young enough to have the energy to do all this.?

The eminent common sense of this approach reflects the facet of Oneida that's totally resistant to rock-star excess and hype-ready posturing. This is a band of smart, well-adjusted men who happen to derive a healthy satisfaction from busting open their own heads (and those of audience members) with vast cascades of organ and guitar noise. Briefly, Fat Bobby and I discussed the therapeutic use of mind-altering music. ?A while back,? he relates, ?Somebody asked me, 'Are you okay with being called psychedelic music?' And the reason I'm okay with that is because 'psychedelia', to me, means finding a new perspective to look at things. Life truly is complete chaos. It's uncontrollable, no matter what you think, and to combat that, I think we all build mental and psychic defenses around ourselves. Because you can't handle life if every single second, you're nakedly dealing with meaninglessness and mortality. You have to create structures and filters that allow you to deal, and a lot of what I want our music to be is reflecting different ways to break down those structures and step outside them for a minute, or seven minutes. In that sense, I think sometimes we end up in situations where it's thuggish and brainless, and sometimes we end up in situations where it's totally na�ve, and then sometimes we end up in situations that are pretty intense. Hopefully, at our best, I think we're able to reflect all of those things.?

Naturally, this leads us to Oneida's live show. While their records rank among the finest rock releases of the past decade, the band truly comes into their own in the live setting. Hanoi Jane and Fat Bobby's tendency to write short, proggy riffs and layer them ad infinitum over the hyperkinetic drumming of Kid Millions generates a kind of avant-garage mind-warp wherein the higher brain is elevated into a blissful hypnotic state while the body is freed to rock out in the sweatiest, most obscene fashion. ?The live experience for us, at its best, is very ecstatic and liberating, which is why our live show tends to be different from our records,? Bobby explains. ?We're not trying to replicate everything we put on a record. Because for us, the real power of playing live is partially about slipping outside of your normal consciousness, and we can kind of whip ourselves into this trance state. And on a good night, which is maybe three out of four nights on a tour, I'm really not myself, in a certain way ? or I'm a different version of myself. Which I treasure, you know. I think that's really important.?

I think it's important, too, and if you agree, then nothing should prevent you from getting down to the Red Room this Thursday to see what is almost guaranteed to be one of the year's finest shows.

<p>Saelan Twerdy, 17 July 2006<br /> Check the Events Calendar to get the lowdown on Oneida's July 20th show.<br /> <a href="http://www.jagjaguwar.com">This</a> is Jagjaguwar's website.</p>