Enemy Hogs

This is a reissue of Oneida's landmark second full-length, which was first issued on the now defunct Turnbuckle label. It was with this record's original release that this motley crew of spinmeisters first made a name for themselves. Just when everyone had thought that there was yet another band in the world with the sole intention of devoting itself to the indulgent pursuit of the endless permutations of "noise exploration", we got instead a "slippery" masterpiece that, according to Mojo (for which this record garnered Rock Album of the Month honors), melded "rock'n'roll, garage punk and New Wave [with] Hammond organ arpeggios [bumping] into parping jazz trumpets and MC5-inspired riffs, while a discordant Suicide-spooked backdrop keeps the paranoia levels up." Hopefully, you get the picture and understand why we deemed it necessary to reintroduce this to the masses, with the added bonus of a previously unreleased track to boot. Finally, Oneida offers this explanation: Back in the winter of 1998 when Oneida couldn't find anyone trustworthy to supply us with psychedelics we made some of our own. Using Fat Bobby's childhood chemistry kit and a vintage recipe found in a community library, we made a small batch of mind moonshine to get us through the long session of what was to become ENEMY HOGS. Beginning in the dark days of the cold winter of 1998, we proceeded to lay down thirty hours of seamless brain-boiling freak-out in the tradition of who-the-fuck knows. In those days we ate, slept and lived in Studio Tropical. One morning we awoke to PCRZ weeping over an indoor bonfire of the tapes. After we barely escaped with our lives and the rest of our crystal, we asked Crazee what moved him to destroy what we had begun to call our "mind garden." "The weeds," he said, "The weeds." What I think he was trying to say was that our vision had become compromised in a cloud of paranoia. We were letting the demons outside the hallowed walls of Tropical dictate the sounds that were reaching the tape. So we began again in earnest and with double doses of the mind moonshine. The results you now have in your hands. We were able to save one complete "song" from the destroyed tapes and include it here for the first time. The track is called "O.D.B." and we wrote it after Old Dirty Bastard from the Wu Tang Clan got shot in 1998.

Oneida were born a little too late, and that's probably a good thing for post-punk fans at the end of the '90s. The band has been greatly influenced by Wire and other later punk innovators like Hüsker Dü, transferring many of those bands' elements to the palette of the late '90s. Oneida keep their attention to tune and quick playing, but incorporate bits of garage rock, noise art, and even free jazz. Enemy Hogs defies categorization itself, the only possible class being the rather blanket-like "art rock."