Oneida Interview Aug '09

There’s no way he’s going to answer. It’s 7:30am on a Friday morning in Brooklyn, New York, where Kid Millions of Oneida is, to the best of my knowledge, sprawled across a bed with his cheek pasted to his drool-laden pillow. I try again, the third time, still no answer. I leave a message and wait patiently – three fags and one cup of brew later the phone hops, a long drawn out voice mutters: “Hey, this is Kid from Oneida.” Success! I offer to call back. “No man let’s do it, I’m ready.” I get a quick mental image of Schwarzenegger taunting the Predator: “Come on, do it, do it!”


The band have just released the second LP of the long promised ‘Thank Your Parents’ trilogy (the first instalment, ‘Preteen Weaponry’, comprised just one song). ‘Rated O’ is a little different. Miles different. “Basically the last time we were in Ireland I was asking our friend that books the shows about some great Irish bands that I might not have heard of and Virgin Prunes came up. So I picked up some albums and did some research and I learned about how they did a similar kind of thing, where they did a collection of releases under the name A New Form Of Beauty. I loved the records, and at the same time we were looking through all this material that we had recorded and we were wondering what would be an interesting way to present it.

“I thought it would be cool under one name, one project, and we had already tried to make a triple album called ‘Thank Your Parents’ and it didn’t work out. We tried a few years ago and the album that was released was called ‘Happy New Year’. But we still had this name and this idea so I thought why not make ‘TYP’ this all encompassing concept to try and contain everything that Oneida can do and what we are capable of.”


The result is a triple CD album laden with furious guitar riffs, electronic explosions, abrasive beats, all the feckin’ good stuff that Oneida is capable of producing. Some songs clock in over the 12-minute mark, namely ‘10:30 At The Oasis’ but this is nothing out of the ordinary. “There is nothing conceptual like that. It is conceptual in that it’s like, ‘what are the boundaries of what we can do?’ It’s just music by Oneida. I don’t know what the next one is going to be. It may be more than a single but we don’t have that one done yet. We have some ideas and a lot of stuff recorded but we’re not quite there yet.”

‘Rated O’ will be the fifth full length offering in as many years but the Oneida train keeps on a rollin’ down the tracks. “It’s just what we do, it’s funny, and we don’t know why bands aren’t more prolific! We like to have that work ethic where we keep producing and recording and playing. It is hard to balance making money and making music and a few of the guys do have families so it’s a challenge, but Oneida is a challenge for all of us. It’s not ‘the priority’ but it is ‘a priority’ so we do make a lot of sacrifices to do the band.”