Staff pick of the week...
This week...Bill's radio reveals Secret Machines

Artist: Secret Machines Title: Now Here Is Nowhere Format: CD Price: $13.00	Tracks on this CD:
	First Wave Intact
	Sad and Lonely
	The Leaves Are Gone
	Nowhere Again
	The Road Leads Where It's Led
	Pharaoh's Daughter
	You Are Chains
	Light's On

We stock 60-100 new releases each week at Parasol and are able to listen to a mere subset of them when intermingled with our favorite in-house releases and all the Supertramp and Fifth Dimension that Michael plays. With all this music flooding the building, sometimes a gem slips under our radar. Recent programming changes at a radio station in town, WPGU, have made our area airwaves far more "Parasol friendly" to the extent that I've even found a terrific band based on their airplay rather than our own digging at Parasol HQ.

The album that has piqued my interest is the Secret Machines' Now Here Is Nowhere. They deliver melodic rock with clever arrangements and a heavy Mercury Rev/Flaming Lips/Delgados vibe (perhaps it's the Dave Fridmann-esque drum production). They're one of those bands I find myself waiting to hear the DJ identify while I'm sitting idle in the Target parking lot en route to buying a new 64 pack of diapers and baby formula.

They're a band good enough to make me pause my life to find out who they are and I hope you'll find the same to be true... how's that for a testimonial?



from the All Music Guide:

The Secret Machines aren't breaking any new ground on their debut full-length album, Now Here Is Nowhere; instead, they mix up elements of the last 35 years of rock history like the driving rhythms of '70s German rock, the sprawling guitar textures of late-'60s and '70s British psych, pounding drums lifted off of Led Zeppelin II, the expansive textures of arena-friendly '80s groups like U2 and Echo & the Bunnymen, and the aching indie rock vocals of the '90s - basically the same template as the Flaming Lips circa 1993, early Mercury Rev, the Verve, or mid-period Ride. In fact, some of the songs are so indebted to their influences ("Sad and Lonely" is pure Led Zep from the kick of Josh Garza's drums to Ben Curtis' very Plant-like vocal, "The Leaves Are Gone" is pure Flaming Lips with Curtis' open-hearted and breaking vocal sounding like Wayne Coyne with pitch, and "Nowhere Again" is a dead ringer for a track on Mercury Rev's See You on the Other Side album) that it takes a healthy dose of suspended judgment to let the songs sink in and begin to work their magic. It is worth the effort, too, because there is some magic to be had here. What makes the record good is the level of dedication the bandmembers throw into their work, the lovely walls of sound they build on each track, and most of all the sense of untrammeled joy they infuse their music with. Tracks like the sprawling opener "First Wave Intact," the drifting "Pharaoh's Daughter," "The Leaves Are Gone," and the poignant ballad "You Are Chains" are the work of a band in love with sound, both volume and texture, and a band with the melodic sense to make their atmospheres more than just pretty sounds. By the end of the last track, the epic "Now Here Is Nowhere," the Secret Machines have proven themselves as worthy heirs to the indie rock tradition that the Lips and the Rev established so well. Now Here Is Nowhere isn't on par with either of those band's best work, but it is a promising beginning and - more importantly - an intriguing and exciting listen.



from PitchforkMedia.com:

Secret Machines
Now Here Is Nowhere
[Warner Bros; 2004]
Rating: 8.2

The first thing you notice is the rhythm section: large, lumbering drums and hydraulic bass flexes on the nine-minute "First Wave Intact", the lead-off track on The Secret Machines' awkwardly titled debut album, Now Here Is Nowhere. The rhythms are military-precise, locked-in and steady, but they're less heavy metal than Heavy Metal: The band sounds as though they're scoring an intergalactic space battle, or perhaps something more terrestrial, like the lurching onslaught of a thousand warbeasts.

Or maybe it's just the march of the marketing behemoth behind Now Here Is Nowhere, which is one of the first major label albums to be released for commercial download before its official street date. In Phase 1 of the assault, the album was posted on the band's website and on select retailers like iTunes, along with a free five-song EP (containing the well-worth-it outtake, "Cannon"). For Phase 2, Reprise released an early version of Now Here Is Nowhere in a "babypack"-- a simple sheaf of cardboard with minimal graphics and a low price. And now, we've arrived at the final phase of the master plan-- the album's actual release, for which the label presumably hopes all those people who downloaded it or bought the tyke-size version will either spring for the "real" album or at least have told all their friends about it.

It's too early to tell whether this three-pronged attack will actually succeed, but if it doesn't, it won't be the band's fault. Veterans of Dallas-area groups like UFOFU and Tripping Daisy, these three New Yorkers-by-way-of-Texas-- drummer Josh Garza and brothers Ben and Brandon Curtis-- build a classic rock front to launch a full-out musical assault. Garza's imperturbable drums stand strong against Brandon Curtis' guitar explosions and Ben Curtis' psych-rock keyboard scribbles. Early reviews of Now Here Is Nowhere have likened the band to 70s-era Pink Floyd, a comparison that is limited but not unwarranted. "Pharaoh's Daughter", for example, turns on an elegant Dark Side of the Moon chord change and a volley of "Us and Them" voices in the chorus.

But The Secret Machines are no nostalgia act: "Pharaoh's Daughter" counters the Floyd references with a drumbeat practically quoted from Isaac Hayes' cover of Bacharach's "Walk on By". Plus, they deploy a strategy similar to that of The Flaming Lips and Grandaddy: Not only is Garza more Steve Drozd than John Bonham (which could be a compliment), but The Secret Machines create songs that are just as spacey and concept-heavy, if not quite as quirky, as those on Yoshimi and The Sophtware Slump. "Leaves Are Gone" lolls along on the delicate ebb and flow of Brandon Curtis' keyboard cascades, forming a quiet counter to more aggressive songs like "Sad and Lonely". "Light's ON" boasts a better new wave hook than just about anything else to come out of NYC this year, crackling with a palpable paranoia as Curtis decries the intrusiveness of a Big Brother-like observer: "Somewhere there's a record of your whereabouts/ Everywhere you go you leave a trace.../ The light's ON/ We don't know just who our friends are." But there are forces allied against these threats, people who thrive in the underground: "The light's ON/ And we're waiting for the signal."

The nervous lyrics and jittery energy of "Light's ON" underscore the pervasiveness of the military imagery on the album, revealing a directed-- if not entirely legible-- political agenda. On "Pharaoh's Daughter", Curtis describes a brewing rebel movement in life-during-wartime language: "We dressed in uniforms left over from the war/ A tourniquet, an iron vest/ Our emblem was a star." A lone star, perhaps.

Now Here Is Nowhere pulses with a sexual tension that matches the swagger of the Texas-size drums on songs like "Nowhere Again", when Curtis sings, "There's a woman in the mirror in a fiery state/ As she motions to me I start turning away/ She's lifting her dress up/ Trying to keep up." While this erotic energy threatens to undercut the political tensions on the album, it actually humanizes and intensifies them.

The meaning behind all this political and sexual intrigue is a little vague. The "Now" and the "Here" of the album title apparently describe America during its war on terrorism, but beyond that, the album's most specific statement is that rock music, regardless of influences or labels, can still be a subversive agent in society. Although the sound is bombastic, the message is subtler and variable from one listener to another. Now Here Is Nowhere may sound like a full-on assault, but it's actually a covert spec-ops infiltration, as the name Secret Machines suggests; the band step loudly but carry a concealed weapon. Politically, this reticence could have been a cop-out, but aesthetically, it leaves the album open for interpretation, which means it should have a longer life than the current administration.