This is a cross-post from my Sound Club music club, where I regularly share an album for listening and discussion. Check out the club here.
Secret Machines were one of the first artists I discovered through the medium of the MP3 blogs — sites like Fluxblog.org that got their start by hosting MP3 files of new music, and talking about them. At the time, these sites seemed too good to be true. Perhaps they were — ironically, whilst music is still abundantly available for free, quality journalism is the scarce resource.
Before the age of the MP3 blog, my experience of discovering music typically involved reading about it (in Jockey Slut, Muzik, or The Face), imagining how it sounded, and eventually finding a way to hear it. This often took days or weeks — scouring record shops for vinyl or a CD, or Audio Galaxy for a dodgy MP3. In the case of the latter, I would sometimes get confronted with a file, and then be unsure whether it was even the right thing. I still remember The White Stripe’s Hotel Yorba sounding nothing like the imagined song in my head. It was a thrilling experience, yet also, occasionally, a frustrating one.
The MP3 blogs ended all that, condensing weeks and days to just 20-minutes (or even five, with ADSL)! Secret Machines were apparently a controversial artist in this era because their label, Warner, sent MP3s to bloggers unsolicited, which was considered a perversion of… something? I wasn’t aware of this controversy at the time, and as a music blogger who has spent the last 20 years frankly overwhelmed by unsolicited submissions, it feels like a quaint thing to get riled up about.
Regardless, Secret Machines were founded by brother Brandon and Benjamin Curtis, with Josh Garza on drums. That line-up didn’t endure — Benjamin left to form School of Seven Bells, and he tragically died, before his time, in 2013. Now Here is Nowhere is an epic Möbius strip of an album, preceded only by the band’s (also great) September 000 EP. It saw the band count David Bowie among their fans, yet they also never really topped it, though there are definite glimmers of genius on later LPs.
Weaving together a prog rock sound with elements of Krautrock and psychedelia, the album has a truly epic sound, despite a fairly conventional approach to instrumentation. The only band from that era that feels similar to me was Spiritualized — a group that at times felt more like an art installation than a group of people making music.
Opening with the throbbing First Wave Intact, Now Here is Nowhere has the aesthetic of a Saturn V rocket on the launch pad. Garza’s drums kick like sparks of ignition, before the whole thing gradually lifts off, not in an instant, but with the slowly building intertia of a rocket, jet engines blasting as slivers of crystalline ice tumble from its fuselage. Vocal harmonies evoke something both childlike and otherwordly as the album’s nine minute opener slipstreams to its conclusion.
Sad and Lonely lives on its thundering drums and a chorus that feels like a 60s rock hook captured on faded Polaroid and sellotaped onto the control console of a spaceship. Nowhere Again is probably the album’s most pop moment, a guitar riff looping as its central vocal hook gradually works itself into a frenzy. It is also one example of the album’s looping structure, born out of frustration at (likely accurate) feedback that the initial draft of the album didn’t include a single. Nowhere Again references the album’s closing title track, both in its title and its central riff.
You Are Chains is the song I most immediately gravitated towards. A kind of epic rock ballad, grounded in the kind of massive drums leveraged by Genesis and Tears For Fears, it depicts someone stuck and stranded without even knowing. In line with the interplanetary themes I hear all over this record, Brandon talks about having crash-landed, and I imagine him on an alien world, stuck but too in awe to notice.
Closing with the song Now Here is Nowhere, the album forms a kind of loop, both recalling Nowhere Again, and acting like a mirror to opener First Wave Intact. It shudders with the same sense of scale as the album uses on its opening. Lyrical refrains loop in on themselves, and the record disintegrates, like that Saturn V exploding in space, components scattered to float in disparate directions forever more. The band apparently practiced this song endlessly, playing it for an hour at times. It is the sort of close that makes me want to reach over to my vinyl copy of the album, go back to side A and start the whole thing again right away.
