Boy, this sucks to say. But it seems, so far, that the best indie record of 2004 has come out on Reprise Records, the underground purists who also put out The Goo Goo Dolls and Faith Hill. It seems unlikely that The Secret Machines’ extraordinary full-length debut Now Here Is Nowhere is going to shift as many units for Reprise as, say, Seal’s new LP, but this is a scarily accomplished first album, and a rockingly good listen all the way through. Yeah, there are some soft spots – including roughly sixty horrible, horrible seconds on the title track that honestly sound like Styx’s Kilroy Was Here – but when The Secret Machines are at their best, they recall any number of seminal bands at their bests. This record is that good.
The influence that jumps out the most on Now Here Is Nowhere, I think, is that of the old, scary Flaming Lips – the now-school version of the Lips (incidentally, another Reprise band) is great, but I’m not talking about the gentle auteurs behind Soft Bulletin. I’m talking about the mid-period, noisy, sonically disciplined-yet-still-trippin’-balls Flaming Lips – complete with a robustly bugged-out Wayne Coyne screaming into a megaphone – who made Clouds Taste Metallic and Transmissions From The Satellite Heart. On songs like the explosive “Light’s On” and the pace-setting album opener “First Wave Intact,” The Secret Machines borrow the Old Lips’ thumping flanged-out drums and jagged guitars for their own purposes, and with great effectiveness. These songs also share a textual theme, kind of: a half-defined lyrical thread involving war and memory runs through the album. I can’t say I was able to pull a coherent point out of it, but this isn’t a novel and the vagueness doesn’t hurt much.
Moreover, it’s kind of hard to care where you are in The Secret Machines’ narrative of some future-war when you’re rocking out to the propulsive “Nowhere Again” or “The Road Leads Where It’s Led,” which are the best, fastest, all-in-all filthiest back-to-back cuts on any album released this year. “Nowhere Again” is a straight-up rock song of the first order: I could name influences, or describe its musical components (uh, kinda), but I hope it will suffice to say that it will rock your fucking face off. “The Road” is reminiscent of The Rapture at their best, and a good reminder that well-turned dance-ready rock songs will always slay anything spit out by machines (secret or otherwise). Slower songs – the plaintive and not-unSparklehorse-y “The Leaves Are Gone” in the album’s first half; the sweeping (and, again, sonically Lips-like) “Pharaoh’s Daughter” and the long, anthemic “You Are Chains” in the second – do nothing to slow the record’s impressive momentum. The Secret Machines’ unfortunate encounter with Dennis DeYoung’s robot fantasia comes at the beginning of the album-closing “Now Here Is Nowere,” but it vanishes soon enough, and when that song reprises the pulsing beat to “Nowhere Again,” all is forgiven.
Best, probably, to wrap up before lapsing into straightforward “that was awesome” cheerleading. What’s most remarkable about Now Here Is Nowhere (and what, at times, is also worst about it) is its ambition: it’s reckless willingness to make grand musical statements, its attempt to keep multiple thoughts in its head at the same time, it’s fearless dance along the line of goofiness. The Secret Machines have a lot of music left in them, I hope, but what’s most heartening about Now Here Is Nowhere – besides the obvious, which is that it’s a lot of fun to listen to and really, for lack of a better word, rocks – is that it’s clear that this is a band that takes their work seriously. It’s scary to think about, after hearing such an expressive and impressive debut, but these guys are just getting started. |