Angels stole the show, the roaring seraph singing thunder

Secret Machines: Now Here Is Nowhere

Now Here Is Nowhere builds up in tiny increments. The rhythm section on “First Wave Intact” follows a simple, ponderous pattern, the low-end bass of the guitar climbing up the scale and being reeled back at every third note and pulled back down, while the keyboards set up a dizzy floating atmosphere and the lead guitar plays harsh strands of ten notes for the first minute and a half until everything hits a wall and comes to an audibly grinding halt, stripping back down to the rhythm section for the introduction of vocals. The next minute and a half constitutes the first verse and chorus, and the tempo shifts up one beat. The keyboard part spins all around the channels. Finally, after another minute and a half there is this moment where all of the instruments cut out silent from the grooved rhythm they had been locked into for five minutes. ‘The rest is theft,’ Curtis sings, a backwards-looped huge drum beat hits and everything comes surging back in. It’s a big dramatic moment and it’s glorious.

For some people, this sort of thing is boring. It is about repetition and patterns, developing incrementally, ponderously structured. Modern American Motorik. I find it invigorating. Pulsing, rhythmic, always sounding just on the verge of chaos, adding pieces until it sounds as if it may topple over. By the seven minute mark of “First Wave Intact” each instrument has acquired an additional beat or note (or two) and it all rushes forward into a rising haze of static and feedback until it all stops dead at that central drum-beat, this time played forward. This is sound architecture, massive and sharp-cornered.

“Nowhere Again” starts with someone frantically pounding at a piano then all of a sudden all the instruments come in from all sides all on the same insistent rhythm. The piano drops back to spare droplets, the vocals talk about negation, loneliness, paranoia – ‘our lives, erased.’ “The Road Leads Where It’s Led” begins with a metallic winding sound and opens up into a wide expanse of sound, the rhythm trading off between bass, guitar, and drums in circular sequences, tempered by warm, resonant keyboard sound. In the chorus, the guitar saws back and forth through steadily increasing distortion.

Massive like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, this album deals crushing blow after crushing blow. I remain in awe.

93% => ****1/2 —currently # 5 in my best of 2004 list—

~ by jshopa on May 2, 2008.