The Secret Machines are never going to make it to "The O.C." Their candyprog blitz-- which combines Krautrock precision with U2-size melodies-- is better suited to a show like "Battlestar Galactica", with its Cylon battles and lost-in-space conspiracies, than to beach houses and young sunny romance. This is by no means a strike against the Texas trio: On the band's first full-length, they made cockpit music that was smarter and more confident than they got credit for, and those seemingly contradictory sonic elements-- the minutiae of the rhythms and the broad strokes of melody-- inflated each other to widescreen proportions, excusing the band's similarities to Pink Floyd and the Flaming Lips, while suggesting they had stumbled onto some new combination of these common influences.
The Secret Machines' follow-up, Ten Silver Drops, is more earthbound than its predecessor-- the aftermath of the battle or the adrenaline crash. The band is less concerned with the previous album's veiled post-9/11 implications, which made Now Here sound like coded messages from a life-during-wartime underground. Instead, these eight songs (not 10-- we're two silver drops short) address everyday issues like romantic fallout, narcotic paranoia, and intraband relations. The first few sound the most invested: "Alone, Jealous & Stoned" is reportedly about the band members' simultaneous breakups with their respective others, as if the draw of the road has proved stronger than the pull of another human. "All at Once (It's Not Important)" explores this palpable pessimism even further, risking an emotional frankness that flirts with, but ultimately transcends, emo recrimination. "Remember back when we first met, it don't mean much," Brandon Curtis sings. "All those things you said you never meant." Despite its thudding bombast-- it's both the heaviest and most agile song on the album-- "Lightning Blue Eyes" is tender where "All at Once" is cold, as Curtis tries to find some use for now useless memories.
Together, those tracks form a strong stoner trilogy that derives its power from the songs' candor and contradictions. Plus, the subject matter brings out the best in the musicians, as they orchestrate these mood swings for maximum impact, sounding as big and as serious as ever-- even as they wallow in gloomy downheartedness. Unfortunately, these songs are immediately followed by "Daddy's in the Doldrums", the weakest track here, a plodding eight-minute riff on drugs that quotes a drumbeat straight from Now Here and features the band's silliest lyrics. "I Hate Pretending" continues in that same vein (no pun intended), upping the paranoia as Brandon Curtis describes a potential drug bust. But he hangs the hook on the line, "There's an undercover cop parked right across the road," which seems too clunky and pedestrian to be anything but goofy in this context. The directness of these two songs is telling: There's not much to either of them, even as they play into the druggy clichés of the Machines' influences.
Perhaps the album's critical flaw is that songwriting and sound seem less integrated. Brandon Curtis often sounds like he's singing over the music, not with it. The songs hew too closely to the lyrical structures, leaving the band no space to sprawl or, god forbid, jam. As a result, Ten Silver Drops settles into a midtempo sameness over its second half. "Faded Lines", with its chorus of filtered voices, ticks upward momentarily, an epilogue to that initial trilogy in quality as much as theme. After that, the album lingers for two more songs: The sonic wallpaper of "I Want to Know" wastes one of Ben Curtis's best guitar lines, while "1,000 Seconds" sounds cumbersome as it tries to make a final statement on romantic disappointment. By that point, the mood is ruined, the buzz hashed.
Ten Silver Drops is an album in need of some plan of attack. Lacking the dynamic cohesion that made its predecessor more than the sum of its tracklist, it feels like merely a collection of random tracks, which, despite their common themes, begin to sound haphazard in their arrangements and sequencing. The problem isn't that they're grounded in real-life problems-- that might be the album's strongest draw. But just because the relationships have stalled doesn't mean the music should lose its forward momentum as well.
