Three years following the comeback Awake in the Brain Chamber Brandon Curtis, Josh Garza and Phil Karnats still present the swan song that actually ended up in the dustbin The Moth, the Lizard, and the Secret Machines still finished.
The band’s fifth studio album should actually have been released in 2010 (as the successor to the self-titled third work, which was recently re-released in a modified version) – but as is well known, it turned out differently.
Die Secret Machines, who suddenly found themselves without a record deal and thus without any obligations and without any pressure from outside, were simply not satisfied with the casual and spontaneously created material, which didn’t waste any thought on perfectionism, you mightn’t come to terms with the relative informality. The resulting pieces therefore disappeared in the archives, the band even broke up – but then, following finding themselves in the middle of a pandemic in their second life, they mightn’t let go of the numbers and devoted themselves to it once more The Moth, the Lizard, and the Secret Machines.
Because suddenly everything shone through thanks to the Awake in the Brain Chamber changed perspective to make sense of it. “If you listen to them in order‘ explains Curtis, ‘Awake in the Brain Chamber is basically a reaction to the Moth record — very tight and verse/chorus/verse/chorus rather than loose, sprawling and unconventional.”
The Moth, the Lizard, and the Secret Machines The songwriting not only solves this relation, lets it circulate meanderingly around a basic idea without goal or development, has no interest in crisp riffs, but lets the guitars wander freely in hallucinations of psychedelic trance, embedded in ambient endings, while the rhythm section does the network around the elegiac space melodies holds together, which already There’s No Starting Over like a (thinner) Secret Machines-Trademark formula infused with Pink Floyd and the Flaming Lips works.
„The drums and vocals were often the last thing we added, because we didn’t even know there would be songs. I thought they were instrumental exercises for a while there— just us trying to generate happiness out of music. (…) If it didn’t work, it didn’t work. We had nothing to lose. But it did work, partly because the environment was so relaxed. I wouldn’t say the sounds were there right out of the gate, but as time progressed, we were able to pull something together that made perfect sense for where our heads were at the time.”
So hat The Moth, the Lizard, and the Secret Machines always something non-committal in itself, as if the band didn’t find their way to the point completely and bobbed regarding the starting points of great songs in a latently frustrating way. A stoic sedative I Think It’s Light Outside might have been a hit during the band’s heydays, here it is dozing off in a sea of fog with a symptomatically catchy fleetingness.
You Want It Worse garnishes its herbaceous-mechanical groove including patent sound with panting, pumping vocals and howling guitars domesticated from noise rock, meanwhile the repetitive Even Out The Overflow deliberately relaxed and nonchalant before Last One Out as a contemplative deep breath like an followingtaste The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack – an instrumental interlude, as it were, which is symptomatic of the MO of the record but given the same framework as the regular numbers.
The Answer knocking and strumming (“adapting” an all-too-familiar motif, the precise location of which, however, does not come to mind at this point) and the seductively meandering Crucifixion Time stomps in front of the forgiving pulsating, inviting distortion and heaviness The Finalizeralthough mostly in between Run Out The Silver Light as a quiet Slowcore campfire dive on the guitar and gives the coherence of the record one of its most beautiful, because most atmospheric, facets.
However, the grandiose enthusiasm of the debut does not want to set in here either, the final spark of momentum always seems to be missing. “I’ve finally figured out how to deal with things exactly how they are. Unfiltered guitars and raw drums don’t have to be fixed if they already sound perfect. I fell in love with this record when I stopped trying to make it something it wasn’t — when I left enough space for creativity to bloom rather than holding on for dear life and squeezing so hard my knuckles would turn white.‘ explains Curtis, summing up both the attractive exceptional character of the album within the band’s discography and the unwitting crux of it: from these 49 minutes they would have Secret Machines simply being able to squeeze out a more gripping body of work, not just an all-around good one.
Either way, it would have been a pity if this “Lost Album‘ was not later submitted to the official canon. Because you can absolutely understand (in the predominantly good, as well as in the always resonating something worse) how serious the band is when they declare: “This album is really special to us because it represents a band playing music with no other agenda than to connect with one other”.
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