Secret Machines - Seattle, WA

By: Donna Brown

Thursday November 02, 2006

Secret Machines have finally come to terms with their Texas prog-psych roots and are doing this entire tour IN THE ROUND.
Photo By Mark Laubenheimer

I had previously been lamenting the fact that I forgot to smoke a ton of weed before going to this show, so's I could enjoy the full-on strobe-light-epilepsy-causing Secret Machines experience. BUT the Showbox staff was, as usual, so power-mad and inconsistent that my mellow would have been harshed like Secret Machines' musical ancestor Roky Erickson's when he decided that the mental institution might be better than a Texas jail. I mean, I didn't endure electroshock or anything, but they are kinda irritating.

ANYWAY, the awesome thing about this show was that Secret Machines have finally come to terms with their Texas prog-psych roots (they live in Brooklyn now, but you can't tell) and are doing this entire tour IN THE ROUND. Literally. How awesome is that? I thought they were gonna cheat and have an extra-circular stage BUT NO, IT WAS A CIRCLE! Schweet. The strobe lights were incredible. Unlike many a band that uses them, the Machines have fully incorporated lighting into their aesthetic. That's super-prog. Also super-prog were the extended instrumental jams that wormed their way into every song, reined in only by Josh Garza's super-human drumming. He's like Frankenstein's drummer - a huge man with huge hair and huge Bonham sticks with which he BEATS THE LIVING SHIT out of a tiny drum set. The last time I saw them I couldn't hear for a week.

Garza is quite literally the band's beating heart, giving focus to the Curtis brothers' flighty melodies and borderline-afterthought lyrics ("She's pulling her dress up/All the way up"? Do what now?). But lyrics are not the Secret Machines' primary focus-like I said, it's all about the total experience, man. The set seamlessly melded material from the band's new album, the meditative Ten Silver Drops, and Now Here Is Nowhere. (Sadly enough,September 000 was left out in the cold again.)

Ten Silver Drops is the band's breakup album - all three members were dumped prior to the recording. Bad for them, great for me - the material combines the band's usual intricacy with the boy-do-I-feel-sorry-for-myself lyrics that I enjoy hearing when I'm not dating anyone. Critics have derided Ten Silver Drops for its lack of immediacy. To which I say - haters, as usual, can step off. Subtlety does NOT equal inaccessibility. Just ask the eighty billion frat boys in the audience - they don't have time for inaccessibility! Although they were mostly there for "Lightning Blue Eyes," the new album's most straightforward song. So there goes that theory. The light motif, most apparent in that song, crops up in a lot of the Machines' songs, and not in an obvious way, which I love. Too bad they didn't recreate the awesomeness that is "Nowhere Again" (source of the aforementioned lyric), opting instead for that album's closing quasi-instrumental version. The whole show was more like an art installation than a concert. Turns out I didn't even need the weed!