The new single from the Secret Machines' pounding 2004 debut and the title track for the dull follow-up EP, "The Road Leads Where It's Led", contains all the elements that make Texas trio's sound distinctive, albeit not unique. Josh Garza's military timing contrasts dramatically with Brandon Curtis's rumbling guitar and Ben Curtis's stoner keyboard atmospherics and coded-message lyrics create a strange and insistent urgency that's still fresh more than a year later. "The Road Leads Where It's Led" is easily the best song on its namesake EP, which collects one other original and four covers.
The selling point for many listeners will most likely be the covers of Van Morrison, Barrett Strong (well, Bradford and Gordy), and Bob Dylan. Morrison's "Astral Weeks" starts promisingly enough, with a pendulum rhythm arcing between guitar and keyboards and Brandon Curtis delivering Morrison's mystical lyrics. Garza's drums add heft to the sound, and towards the end the instruments start reverberating trippily, as if they've actually gone astral. But the problem with "Astral Weeks" is the same problem that's more pronounced on "Money (That's What I Want)" and "Girl From North Country": The Secret Machines seem so restricted by the lyrical structures of these songs that the only deviations they can make from the originals are slowing the tempo and adding more tedious dynamics.
"Money" and "Girl from the North Country" are both very slow and very long...but that's about it. They nearly triple the running times of their respective originals, but there's not much to them besides some foggy psychedelica to justify such lengths. And considering "Money" has historically had little compunction about its greediness, the Secret Machines could have turned the song into a biting and topical commentary on institutional avarice that would have fit perfectly on the conspiratorial Now Here Is Nowhere. But instead, there seems to be little meaning to the song beyond its stunt value.
The Machines' version of Dylan's "Girl from the North Country" begins with as much promise as "Astral Weeks": a laser-light-show synth pierces the ambience before giving way to quiet pulses of sound that give the song its sense of gloomy foreboding. Later, an acoustic guitar plays so faintly it sounds like a 40-year-old echo of Dylan's. The song gently breaks as if building toward something big and majestic, but its structure is so closely and reverently tied to Dylan's lyrical progressions that the Machines cannot deviate from his song structure. It's entirely constructed around Ben Curtis's vocals, and the other instruments-- guitar and drums-- are relegated to supporting roles, whereas on Now Here Is Nowhere the trio traded off melodic lines among instruments for optimum drama. The band maintains a palpable tension for nine minutes, but it all comes to nothing-- the fog never lifts, the song remains shapeless.
For a band that gets so many dogged comparisons to Pink Floyd, these are perhaps admirable, even necessary attempts to expose the breadth of their influences. But ultimately, these somewhat obvious choices don't really reflect much on the Machines' sonic palette. In fact, the original track "Better Bring Your Friends" and, to a lesser extent, their cover of Harmonia's "De Luxe (Immer Weider)" are the only two tracks on the EP that reveal new facets of the band. The EP's most obscure cover is also its most concise (shorter than the original) and in some ways its most faithful: Without playing note for note, "De Luxe" re-creates the original's rigid tempo, regimented rhythms, Doppler momentum, and studied repetition and suggests that the Machines have deeply absorbed Krautrock elements into their own sound, even if they don't refashion those elements into anything new on this cover.
More fun and less academic, the Machines original "Better Bring Your Friends" is the true surprise here. It draws on their Texas influences to create an upbeat vibe that would go over well at Willie Nelson's Fourth of July picnic. Even more crucially, there is no hint of awkwardness or hesitation: all of the sonic elements-- Garza's hoedown drumbeat, Ben Curtis's loose vocals and propulsive piano-- blend together fluidly and dramatically. If some of these songs are wrong turns, "Better Bring You Friends" gets them back on the road Now Here Is Nowhere started them along.
