"The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly
related, that it is difficult to class them
separately. One step above the sublime makes the
ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes
the sublime again." — Thomas Paine
This is big. From the opening crunch of Josh Garza's
drums the impression is one of monolithic vastness.
Secret Machines, three Texans transplanted to New
York, rocket into the stratosphere with an unashamedly
huge sound, a reverberating blast-off. While
Radiohead's Hail to the Thief sounded like the
culmination of a steady withdrawal from the epic into
a series of non-concentric micro-worlds, this is music
as a macrocosm, a universe of sound focused and
streamlined into a heady rush of sensation.
The Curtis
brothers, Benjamin and Brandon, make up the remainder
of this trio — Benjamin's guitar playing is a
psychedelic pulse punctuated by triumphal riffs, with
echoes of early Mercury Rev, and Brandon's vocals are
a more grounded variant on Wayne Coyne's otherworldly
whine. But where the Flaming Lips of Clouds Taste
Metallic teetered on a sort of internal collapse, and
the Mercury Rev of Boces sounded almost accidentally
epic, Secret Machines sound somehow inevitable. The
right buttons are pushed throughout and the music
accelerates and cruises along a clear flight-path.
There's little by way of tension, or unexpected
diversion. The trajectory seems mapped out clearly in
advance; it's a chartered trip rather than a voyage
into the unknown.
And yet it gets you in the end. It hammers away
noisily with an insistency that is ultimately
irresistible. It's big but it's also clever. Behind
this conflation of volume and bluster there's an
instinctive dynamism. From a launch pad that's part
John Bonham, part Bowie's "V-2 Schneider," "First Wave
Intact" tells us almost immediately everything we need
to know about this band in a classic statement of
intent. "Sad and Lonely" follows, swamping its lyrical
compassion in monumental instrumentation. Lyrically,
in fact, the band wavers between the elliptical and
the obtuse, with a persistent undercurrent of
melancholia in apparent opposition to the music's
grand designs. This contradiction is, however,
overcome by sheer momentum — the chorus to "The Road
Leads to Where It's Led" is "They're blowing all the
other kids away," but it's sung like a triumphant
hymn. There's a brief sub-Floydian reverie in "The
Leaves Are Gone" and some vaguely Prog atmospherics at
the start of “Pharoah's Daughter” but it's the epic,
space-rock histrionics which dominate.
As the title
track's thundering, kosmiche groove — an unlikely but
winning combination of Neu! and Led Zeppelin — ends
this album, you may experience a strange sense of
admiration for this predictably overblown, infectious
music, and a nagging urge to hear it again.
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