The title of the album Now Here is Nowhere does well to capture the general space of our American condition: parking lots lit up like landing strips, wet leaves stuck to the hands of modern people, the chains of individuation and violence, and the city inside of your head when there is nowhere else to go but a sprawling dream.
The first song on the album, The First Wave is Intact, is a work unto itself. Starting off with blunt rhythmic sibilance reminiscence of the Flaming Lips, the Secret Machines weave an urgent story of voyeurism, loss, and urban infantry. Listen close they are watching us. Hold still they are shooting us. As the song spills into itself, a solid (and slightly dull) weave of classic rock guitar is thrown over the top like some ratty afghan you might use to cover a hole in a couch.
Unfortunately, this becomes a motif, as if they needed this to legitimate themselves as an every man rock group.
Getting deeper into the pop rock haze of the album, you can feel the all the genres that Secret Machines balance: space rock, grunge, psychedelia, and Zeppelin-era love ballads (you still love me but don’t know why). This is not to say that they are derivative, rather, very agile in their inheritance.
One of the best songs of the album, The Leaves Are Gone, does well to evoke the drifting patterns of bodies thinned and exhausted by modern living. The next song, Nowhere Again, hashes a convincing and garbled crescendo of mid-'90s rock (Pablo Honey anyone?) where the electronic borders on the organic and then goes back again. By the end of the song they have me convinced that we now communicate with a language of flags. You are chains, a later track, is gentle in its devastation, like water dripping off rooflines and tenderizing the keys of a synthesizer.
Where the Secret Machines fail is where so many other artists falter, getting out of a song when it has nothing to hold it up. At times, they loose the thread of passion and fall into flat melodies and dull hallucinations. The song Pharaoh’s Daughter comes to mind.
Luckily, they pick it up for the near nine minute title track, Now Here is Nowhere, letting the music breath out into a burned out earth inhabited by eye sores and choirs. Like the first track, it jumps fluidly between its slow reprises and rhythmic charges, making the song a small portrait of the album itself.
In the end, Now Here is Nowhere is a good portrait of the anxieties living inside modern youth: the burden of originality in a place bereft of creativity. Although the album material was most likely born from the Dallas-Fort Worth landscape, I can’t help but looking around Chicago with the same worries. As the wind blows in through luxury condos and wraps the plastic sheeting against the stark metal shells, I begin to wonder where we will go for inspiration?
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