Secret Machines 'Now Here Is Nowhere'
Ok, the fightback starts here. No more Stooges riffs, Lou Reed licks or MC5 kicks. Let’s leave the Cooper Temple Haircuts for the Camden Town skagheads, cos now we’re getting serious. Secret Machines – pertinently, not THE Secret Machines – are the full stop to garage rock and ‘Now Here Is Nowhere’ is the nail in its coffin.
Twelve weapons of mass destruction (mass being the emphasis word – every track here is huge, bulging, err...throbbing), it’s an album as big in scope and ambition as U2’s ‘The Joshua Tree’ and as dark and scary as Robert Smith without his make-up on. And, whilst it may seem crass to burden it with such lofty ambitions only 88 words into this review, you’ll see, or at least hear, why. Like soon-to-be-huge Brit newcomers The Open, Secret Machines create tidal waves of music, punctuating it with choruses as big as the Empire State. And, like New York’s prize possession, they dominate the song’s skyline, their shadows creeping through verses, ready to impose themselves.
We could call it prog, but we’d sound like twats so we won’t. Opener ‘First Wave Intact’ rides like a rollercoaster sailing off a cliff, slamdunking Pink Floyd into Sonic Youth’s back catalogue, whilst, when the song comes to a crashing, chaotic close ten minutes later and you think the band have spent themselves too early, they simply steady themselves and unleash another. ‘Sad And Lonely’ sounds like Flaming Lips if they were, like, actually on fire, ‘Pharoah’s Daughter’ is dreamy, Grandaddy-in-space psychedelia, ‘Nowhere Again’ resembles …Trail Of Dead if they concentrated on playing their instruments rather than smashing them whilst if the chorus of ‘Road Leads Where It Led’ doesn’t leave an indelible mark on your brain, then you haven’t got one.
Having channeled the dynamite-laced explosions of their debut mini-album ‘September 000’ into a series of some of the best songs you’ve heard all year, Secret Machines, quite literally, will explode. No limp-wristed Datsun or Black Rebel is going to stop them. The machine is rolling and it’ll crush all in its wake.
Secret Machines 'Now Here Is Nowhere' (679) Released June 28 2004.
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