The first thing you notice is the rhythm section: large, lumbering drums and hydraulic bass flexes on the nine-minute "First Wave Intact", the lead-off track on The Secret Machines' awkwardly titled debut album, Now Here Is Nowhere. The rhythms are military-precise, locked-in and steady, but they're less heavy metal than Heavy Metal: The band sounds as though they're scoring an intergalactic space battle, or perhaps something more terrestrial, like the lurching onslaught of a thousand warbeasts.
Or maybe it's just the march of the marketing behemoth behind Now Here Is Nowhere, which is one of the first major label albums to be released for commercial download before its official street date. In Phase 1 of the assault, the album was posted on the band's website and on select retailers like iTunes, along with a free five-song EP (containing the well-worth-it outtake, "Cannon"). For Phase 2, Reprise released an early version of Now Here Is Nowhere in a "babypack"-- a simple sheaf of cardboard with minimal graphics and a low price. And now, we've arrived at the final phase of the master plan-- the album's actual release, for which the label presumably hopes all those people who downloaded it or bought the tyke-size version will either spring for the "real" album or at least have told all their friends about it.
It's too early to tell whether this three-pronged attack will actually succeed, but if it doesn't, it won't be the band's fault. Veterans of Dallas-area groups like UFOFU and Tripping Daisy, these three New Yorkers-by-way-of-Texas-- drummer Josh Garza and brothers Ben and Brandon Curtis-- build a classic rock front to launch a full-out musical assault. Garza's imperturbable drums stand strong against Brandon Curtis' guitar explosions and Ben Curtis' psych-rock keyboard scribbles. Early reviews of Now Here Is Nowhere have likened the band to 70s-era Pink Floyd, a comparison that is limited but not unwarranted. "Pharaoh's Daughter", for example, turns on an elegant Dark Side of the Moon chord change and a volley of "Us and Them" voices in the chorus.
But The Secret Machines are no nostalgia act: "Pharaoh's Daughter" counters the Floyd references with a drumbeat practically quoted from Isaac Hayes' cover of Bacharach's "Walk on By". Plus, they deploy a strategy similar to that of The Flaming Lips and Grandaddy: Not only is Garza more Steve Drozd than John Bonham (which could be a compliment), but The Secret Machines create songs that are just as spacey and concept-heavy, if not quite as quirky, as those on Yoshimi and The Sophtware Slump. "Leaves Are Gone" lolls along on the delicate ebb and flow of Brandon Curtis' keyboard cascades, forming a quiet counter to more aggressive songs like "Sad and Lonely". "Light's ON" boasts a better new wave hook than just about anything else to come out of NYC this year, crackling with a palpable paranoia as Curtis decries the intrusiveness of a Big Brother-like observer: "Somewhere there's a record of your whereabouts/ Everywhere you go you leave a trace.../ The light's ON/ We don't know just who our friends are." But there are forces allied against these threats, people who thrive in the underground: "The light's ON/ And we're waiting for the signal."
The nervous lyrics and jittery energy of "Light's ON" underscore the pervasiveness of the military imagery on the album, revealing a directed-- if not entirely legible-- political agenda. On "Pharaoh's Daughter", Curtis describes a brewing rebel movement in life-during-wartime language: "We dressed in uniforms left over from the war/ A tourniquet, an iron vest/ Our emblem was a star." A lone star, perhaps.
Now Here Is Nowhere pulses with a sexual tension that matches the swagger of the Texas-size drums on songs like "Nowhere Again", when Curtis sings, "There's a woman in the mirror in a fiery state/ As she motions to me I start turning away/ She's lifting her dress up/ Trying to keep up." While this erotic energy threatens to undercut the political tensions on the album, it actually humanizes and intensifies them.
The meaning behind all this political and sexual intrigue is a little vague. The "Now" and the "Here" of the album title apparently describe America during its war on terrorism, but beyond that, the album's most specific statement is that rock music, regardless of influences or labels, can still be a subversive agent in society. Although the sound is bombastic, the message is subtler and variable from one listener to another. Now Here Is Nowhere may sound like a full-on assault, but it's actually a covert spec-ops infiltration, as the name Secret Machines suggests; the band step loudly but carry a concealed weapon. Politically, this reticence could have been a cop-out, but aesthetically, it leaves the album open for interpretation, which means it should have a longer life than the current administration.
