Oneida - Preteen Weaponry

Welcome, brave traveller! Welcome to the world of tomorrow! As the pompous guff stuck to the cover of Preteen Weaponry announces, this album is one third of Oneida's “colossal new vision of a new age in music.” Well... BEHOLD THAT STRANGE NEW REALITY! No more are we menaced by the tyranny of choruses or tainted by the idle pleasures of melody and structure. Nay, let us beckon forth a future of feedback loops, cyclical drumming and other techniques already used regularly by numerous other musicians. Nope, Oneida didn't have a vision. They had a flashback of being really stoned at a Tool concert during one particularly indulgent jam. It’s a less than revolutionary idea already patented by Tortoise amongst many, many others. What we have here is 40 minutes of wanky, muso anti-instrumentalism. That's not to say it's entirely awful, but neither is it the blessed with the Orwellian insight it professes.[Austin Tasseltine]