The best psychedelic rock has always wiggled around strict classification. Medieval ballads float into stretches of raga and choruses of pure pop–the strangest segues are sanctified by the sense that the players are unified in some acid-pattern glow on a higher plane of weirdness. The music becomes a hard-to-quantify quest with its own dream logic, where all the visuals are hypercolorful and intense. So far everything the New York collective ONEIDA has done has been just the stuff to send you off into that light fantastic. Their new album, Happy New Year (Jagjaguwar), is the last to be recorded at the group’s Brooklyn studio, the Sunset Grill, which has fallen prey to citywide redevelopment and blandification. The disc is partially a lament and partially a drunken wake, with pulsating grooves and shimmering, impish, contrapuntal melodies that can alternately sound like grief over the passage of time or just a damn fine way of passing it. For this tour the band is joined by its newest member, Double Rainbow, aka guitarist Phil Manley of Trans Am and the Fucking Champs. –Monica Kendrick
