ONEIDA
“Happy New Year” (Jagjaguwar)
Oneida, a calmly prolific three-man band from Brooklyn, has always savored repetition: the way it drives a song into motion but goes nowhere, the way it can both hypnotize and irritate. Since 1997 Oneida has followed repetition into various styles that revolve around it: psychedelic drone-rock, classical Minimalism, dance music, art-punk. Lately the band has glanced even farther back, hinting at medieval and Renaissance music in songs that double as Oneida’s rigorously structured take on hipster Brooklyn’s current infatuation, freak-folk.
“Happy New Year” is a virtual summation of Oneida’s first decade, from the disco beat and jabbing guitar and organ of “Up With People,” the triumphal relentlessness of “The Adversary” and the Minimalist pulse of “The Misfit” to the acoustic delicacy of “Reckoning” and “Busy Little Bee.” The album is a perfect introduction for latecomers to this essential New York band.
Now Oneida layers in a new element: vocal counterpoint. “Distress,” which opens the album, remakes an old hymn from the Sacred Harp (or shape note vocal tradition) — “So soon our transient comforts fly/And pleasure only blooms to die” — but sends wah-wah guitar rippling through the intertwined voices.
That’s one of the more lucid songs on the album, which is filled with cryptic elegies and hints of rebirth. Kid Millions and Fat Bobby usually sing quietly, as if comforting themselves: “Cross your heart, hope to die/Calm your voice, set your eye/Turn your back and go,” they advise in “History’s Great Navigators,” an acoustic minimal grid of single repeated piano notes, a plucked string instrument, a muffled drumbeat and a plinking toy piano. The song “Happy New Year” offers cautious hope: “The quiet night falls like a tune/Another song that dispels the gloom.” Oneida’s new songs don’t necessarily dispel gloom; they hold it at bay with musical structures. And as much as the band loves repetition, Oneida still isn’t repeating itself.
JON PARELES
LISA GERMANO
in the maybe world (Young God Records)
Listening to Lisa Germano’s music is a painfully intimate experience, as if a teenage girl were revealing her cutting scars in a cafeteria corner. Though Ms. Germano is in her late 40’s, she has always examined her emotional life with the raw confusion of an adolescent misfit. In the mid-90’s, when female rockers were roaring about empowerment, Ms. Germano was brewing her own haterade, deeming herself “angry and dumb but not too cool” in a narcotic whisper. (See 1994’s brilliant “Geek the Girl.”) On “Lullaby for a Liquid Pig” (2003) she threatens, “I’ll tell you what/It’s not going to be alright.”
Her prediction was correct: “It’s all gone wrong,” she sings on “Too Much Space,” from her hallucinatory new recording, “in the maybe world.” Over spare, piano-based ballads, she explores isolation and conflicted love as if she were huddling naked on a floor at 4 a.m. Ms. Germano aims for a uniform bad-dream atmosphere, keeping tempo changes to a minimum, even when Johnny Marr, a former member of the Smiths, adds guest guitar. “I want to go into oblivion,” she confesses in a hushed, little-girl voice that is simultaneously deadened by disappointment, achingly vulnerable and bristling with passive-aggressive anger.
She is the kind of nightmare lover who pleads, “Go to hell/I love you.” Ms. Germano’s music is beautifully haunted and composed, but almost too claustrophobic to bear. This is the kind of record one would only listen to after crashing an ex’s wedding, or while dialing a crisis hot line on New Year’s Eve. At least “After Monday” ends on a hopeful note: “When you wake up it’ll be O.K.” But only until the next album. SIA MICHEL
HELMET
Monochrome (Warcon Records)
The members of the band Helmet always kept their critical distance from metal. There were no mortuary-related album covers, no spikes, no eyeliner: just a compact vocabulary of well-written, irregular-length, low-pitched guitar riffs over a nice four-four groove: the kind of swing-metal rhythmic feeling that can be traced back to the Bad Brains’ song “Re-Ignition,” but denser, with more complex harmonies.
They were right to keep away. Metal lyrics and attitudes deal in certainties, but the band’s singer and songwriter, Page Hamilton, didn’t go that way. He played opaque, hard-boiled games with language, writing songs that had few concrete referents; most of Helmet’s albums didn’t even need a warning sticker. Briefly the band got the respectable audience it deserved. “Meantime,” from 1992, sold more than half a million copies, and was cited as an inspiration for the wave of new-metal bands that briefly blossomed in the late 90’s, then imploded.
