Dragons of Zynth and Secret Machines at Music Hall of Williamsburg

Dragons of Zynth and Secret Machines at Music Hall of Williamsburg
Just before The Secret Machines took the stage at Music Hall of Williamsburg Tuesday night, a few kids started circling the venue, handing out 3D glasses. Glasses?

“You can’t see the show without glasses,” was the response. Are they that blinding a presence? I wondered at first. But the glasses proved to be more essential to the Machines’ show than perhaps they intended. Without the rainbow flowers covering everything, there wasn’t much to see—or hear for that matter. From the beginning, The Secret Machines were dark, slow and repetitive. Their first song was dominated by a single sludgy riff, played over and over. It was heavy, to be sure, but finally collapsed under its own weight, dragging the song to a halt.

The Secret Machines’ best moments came when they laid down a deep groove, which drummer Josh Garza does perfectly. And guitarist Phil Karnats, who joined the band in 2007 to replace founding guitarist Benjamin Curtis, could reach moments that were simultaneously weighty and transcendent. But the groove was ruined as soon as singer Brandon Curtis launched into the structured sections of the songs, or it imploded if left on its own for too long. And there was always the nagging feeling those sounds were achieved first, and more interestingly, by bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.

It’s always interesting to watch a band get upstaged. But usually that’s the job of the headliner. On Tuesday night, the headliners were upstaged by Dragons of Zynth, the band that immediately preceded them. On a superficial level, DOZ simply looked more interesting, and more unlikely: three black guys (guitarist Akwetey O.T. sporting a feathered hat, keyboardist Aku in a space-age tracksuit, drummer Bizza dressed either like a salesman at Staples or the drummer for an R&B band) and a very thin Asian girl on bass (Fon Lin, whom one could imagine might weigh less than her bass guitar).

But somehow these disparate presences fused into a comprehensible, if complicated, whole. During DOZ’s fourth song a Jekyll-and-Hyde dynamic emerged, with Akwetey singing like Sly Stone over a futuristically silken groove, only to be interrupted by berserk heavy-metal freakouts from Aku. Although Akwetey and Aku’s nearly identical voices make it clear they are brothers, the band plays as if all the members are blood relatives.

Aside from the 3D glasses, The Secret Machines’ stage presence basically consisted of a frame made of metal poles—reminiscent of a soccer goal without the net—draped with a web of white ribbons. Between hard-rock thrashing, soul crooning and the occasional stage dive, The Dragons of Zynth seemed to have about three acts going at once. Of course, stage presence can’t help a band’s music, but it certainly makes a live show a lot more interesting.