Ten Silver Drops came out back in April, which I mentioned at the time, but I shamefully admit to not actually purchasing it until just last month since it’s been streaming on the Secret Machines' website all this time. Finally I dropped actual cash for the real thing, and I’ve been listening to it constantly ever since.
Why was everyone so down on this album? Was it residual disappointment from all the other tepid releases by noteworthy bands? The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Flaming Lips, Built to Spill, and the Walkmen (among others) all put out fairly boring albums within two months of each other. Perhaps the prevailing mood among music critics caused them to chuck the Secret Machines in with the rest. This should be rectified: Ten Silver Drops will easily be in my top five of the year come December.
Back in 2004, when their debut full-length Now Here is Nowhere came out, there was an avalanche of hype courtesy their label, Reprise (previously they’d released just an EP, September 000, on the indie Ace Fu). The album was well-received but at the time I was suspicious and dismissive. 2002–04 marked the period when “indie” was aggressively co-opted by the majors and lines were really beginning to blur concerning what that term even meant. As the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol were jumping from indies to the majors and many other bands that might have felt at home on Saddle Creek or Touch & Go were bypassing the indie route altogether, I found myself second-guessing everything—residue from my high school and college days when “sellout” still meant something and corporate record labels were still synonymous with evil. Apparently in the twenty-first century “necessary” attached itself to that evil, as bands like the Strokes and Jimmy Eat World proved that you could get in bed with the suits and still come out in the morning with your soul (and bank account) intact. More and more bands followed suit, and I admit I was slow to believe it could be true; anything that was hyped at that time I pretty much rejected out of hand. Hence, I missed the boat on the Secret Machines.
A year later, amid a cross-country move from New York to Los Angeles, my brilliant wife convinced me that the Secret Machines deserved a listen. She picked up September 000 just before our trip because she had been blown away by the opening track, “Marconi’s Radio.” Somewhere on the highway between West Virginia and Tennessee my love for the Secret Machines was born. The song begins with a patient four and half minutes of a simple five-note piano melody repeated over and over until the guitars finally come crashing in for one bar, then Brandon Curtis’s vocals finally start the song proper (with backing harmonies that seem better placed in a Beatles song than a minimalist rock epic). What is so brilliant about this song is that, at nearly eight minutes in length, the only burst of energy comes halfway through, and briefly; the rest of the song, before and after that moment, is rising action. It’s a bold song choice for the first track on the first release, and is the perfect indicator of things to come, both on this EP and from the band in general.
On the surface the Secret Machines do not seem groundbreaking in the way that, say, Radiohead so obviously is in its marriage of pop, electronica, and high-falutin’ concepts. But at the same time there are few bands really operating in the exact same territory as the Secret Machines: musically they are loud, they eschew simple pop structures, they stretch out rather than keep things accessibly concise—but they diverge from their peers by relying just as strongly on melodies and vocal hooks. Whereas Radiohead began as a guitar pop band that subverted that genre with each album, the Secret Machines seem to be doing the inverse: they’re epic indie/prog on the surface but they chip away at the genre's underbelly with pop ingredients—melody and harmony, verse and chorus.
The adverse reaction to Ten Silver Drops is, I think, a result of two forms of backlash related to all of this. First, the inevitable hipster backlash against anything that was overhyped the first time around. People that didn’t think the Secret Machines were all that in the first place are now piping up. Second, the definitive difference between Ten Silver Drops and Now Here is Nowhere is the ratio of instrumental muscle-flexing to Curtis’s vocal presence. In other words, the pop elements, while far from taking over completely, have risen closer to the surface. Only the tail-end of “I Hate Pretending” has a noisy, free-form instrumental section, and even that is tempered by the first half’s story-lyrics describing a drug bust, which many critics have expressed annoyance with. (Personally they don’t bother me; story-lyrics are nothing new in pop music.)
So how could the Secret Machines win? In one corner there are those who either didn’t like them in the first place or, like me two years ago, are dismissive of them simply because hype engenders suspicion; and in the other there seem to be people that are really repulsed by the ways in which Ten Silver Drops differs from its predecessor—less instrumental sections, more lyrics. Neither party seems willing to listen to the album on its own terms.
On its own terms: Ten Silver Drops begins with a string of arguably the three best songs the Secret Machines have ever written. The opener, “Alone, Jealous and Stoned,” applies similar motives as “Marconi’s Radio” did on September 000—it is a melancholy, nearly seven-minute song that never really rocks the way Now Here’s propulsive opener “First Wave Intact” does so commandingly. For a band often given the faint praise that they should be playing in arenas, it is perhaps a surprising choice for an album opener. But the song segues into the best track of the album, “All at Once (It’s Not Important),” which introduces one of the album’s signature sounds, Ben Curtis’s soaring guitar melodies. Here and in a handful of other tracks, the guitar lines seem more interested in floating over the top of the songs rather than riffing as in previous releases; the heavy lifting for each track is shifted instead to Brandon Curtis’s vocals and Josh Garza’s drumming—which somehow call to mind simultaneously John Bonham and Neu!’s Klaus Dinger. His motorik-meets-arena-rock drumming is the heart of much of the album, especially the third track, “Lightning Blue Eyes.”
The album’s sole dip is the middle track, “Daddy’s in the Doldrums,” which is anchored by a monotonous, sludgy riff and rock-posturing lyrics. Even so the song is not so bad as to sink the entire album, and the group quickly rebounds with the second half of the record, culminating in the outstanding closer, “1,000 Seconds,” again one of the best numbers the band has released to date.
So if four of Ten Silver Drops’ eight tracks are among the best the group has ever done, then surely this album deserves a second look. (Happily, I’m not the first to think so: Chromewaves woke up the Secret Machines a couple of weeks ago.) Cries that the band has somehow fallen off are greatly exaggerated. Yes, I miss some of the instrumental stretches that really identified Now Here is Nowhere, but to claim that Ten Silver Drops has moved too far in the other direction is false. Their pop sensibilities are more apparent here than their previous releases, but at the same time the songs still lean to the long side and are structured in such a way as to keep them well off the radio. There is a sophistication at work beneath all of these songs that should be acknowledged. The entire album (as well as Now Here is Nowhere) is streaming from the band’s website, so I encourage you to check it out for yourself, and stop listening to the haters.
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