Secret's out: They're headliners
The Secret Machines/Moving Units/Autolux
Middle East Downstairs, Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 27, 2005
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in The Boston Globe, January 31, 2005

When the Secret Machines were last in Boston, opening for Interpol at Avalon in October, they had neither subfreezing weather nor the question of their own headlining power to contend with. They faced down both at the Middle East on Thursday night, drawing a solid crowd willing to brave the cold to see the Dallas-by-way-of-New-York band, whose excellent debut album Now Here Is Nowhere (Reprise) was no stranger to best-of-2004 lists.

A minute or two of swelling noise set the tone once they took the stage, and then, with Ben Curtis’s guitar ringing like a clarion wafting from the left channel to the right, the band launched into the pulverizing “Sad And Lonely.” On stage, the Secret Machines deepened both the Floydian expansiveness of their material and the Zeppelinesque muscle of their sound. They could very well be the most economic prog-rock band in history: as lengthy and as grand in scope as their songs are (they were only able to squeeze 11 songs into 70 minutes, with almost no banter or substantial pauses in between), there was no frippery, no long-winded soloing (no substantial solos of any kind, really), no tricky time signatures and no multi-part epics.

Instead, Curtis, his keyboard- and bass-playing brother Brandon and drummer Josh Garza just locked into a groove and rode it, feeding off of each other’s energy so that songs like “The Road Leads Where It’s Led” reached a stunning climax through simplicity and repetition. The rack of lights that stretched all the way across the back of the stage might have seemed extravagant for a young band, but the effect suited them well, throwing them occasionally into backlit shadow as they created their hypnotic stomp and thunder.

Although less than half of the set was devoted to the album, the new songs were strong enough to deflect any reservations about the unfamiliar material. That’s a particularly encouraging sign for the Secret Machines’ future, and if closing with the driving “Nowhere Again” was a minor blunder, that’s only because it would have been nearly impossible to top the preceding “First Wave Intact,” which ended with such a thrilling blast of noise and light that it was like being at a shuttle launch or having a religious vision, practically stopping time by overpowering the audience’s senses.

Despite taking longer to set up than they performed, openers Moving Units were filled with nervous energy as they played an updated version of the rhythm-driven postpunk that never quite melded with New Wave; if they seemed to play the same song over and over, it was at least a good one. They were preceded by Autolux’s hybridized Sonic Youth/Stereolab art noise.

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