To be honest, I seem to remember there being a pretty decent amount of hype surrounding the 2006 release of Secret Machines’ second album, Ten Silver Drops. The album gathered a three-and-a-half-star review in Rolling Stone (which I think they’d automatically give to any album provided it were indie) and the thought of it seeing it on CD in our local library sounds familiar.
As far as I know, though, I am the only person in the entire world who has ever talked about them, a fact which I doubt is really true, but can’t really be disproved, from my perspective, a posteriori. Although, probably, Wolf Parade had more personality, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah had more hook and Black Mountain rocked harder, the psych-rock boys from Dallas always occupied a particular spot in my mind. This is in spite of the fact that, for some reason, I always found them unapproachable.
Well, a lot of this has to do with epoch. Today, they’d fit in well with the new breed of indie bands like Acid Dad and Color Green writing expansive, sonically undulating songs of psychedelic rock that still pare down to a pop appeal. So what in 2006 might have come across as identity crisis, or bet-hedging, perhaps (straddling the territories of dream pop a la Death Cab for Cutie and indie grunge a la Black Mountain/Black Angels), today exudes pure genuineness, as in resting on erstwhile impossible musical territory for a result that has no choice but to walk as authentic.
All over the place, these songs stretch out in length, expand in their own skin, fully breathe and offer a wealthy dynamic of influences. At any given time, you could feel like you were listening to a record of The Black Angels, Traffic, Pink Floyd, Band of Horses and others. In a sense, I think, on Ten Silver Drops, the Secret Machines became the kind of band The Flaming Lips always wanted to, the latter finding, ya know, putting together a single chord progression or genuine swatch of lyrics to be a somewhat more daunting task. A glance as Spotify shows us that this band is still active, having put out an album in 2020, so it might not be too late for us to pay them the homage they truly deserve, as an original and galvanizing act in indie rock. And yes, Ten Silver Drops is out on Reprise, a fact which probably HURT them, since the average car mechanic or plumber who listens to mainstream radio probably doesn’t have the patience for expansive song structures or sonic texture in his RAWK music. 2020’s Awake in the Brain Chamber, as I observe, is out on TSM Recordings, an imprint hitherto unknown to me but which I can only surmise to stand for… “The… Secret… Machines…” Ok, maybe you all are just being really surreptitious in your adoration of this band. (A finger wave is implied here.)
..
<script async src=“https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-5127494401132808”
crossorigin=“anonymous”></script>
..
<!– Google Tag Manager –>
<script>(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({‘gtm.start’:
new Date().getTime(),event:’gtm.js’});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!=‘dataLayer’?’&l=‘+l:’’;j.async=true;j.src=
‘https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id=‘+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window,document,’script’,’dataLayer’,’GTM-5KV22KW’);</script>
<!– End Google Tag Manager –>
<!– Google Tag Manager (noscript) –>
<noscript><iframe src=“https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-5KV22KW”
height=“0” width=“0” style=“display:none;visibility:hidden”></iframe></noscript>
<!– End Google Tag Manager (noscript) –>