No. 01 The God Machine – Scenes from the Second Story

And so here we are, over a year and a half later we get to number one, and a great big who? from a lot of the people reading this. Which is a shame, of all the lost albums I’ve written about, this is one of the most egregiously overlooked. But I would say that. 

So how is this band that most people haven’t heard of made the top slot? For that story we have to go back a long time to my days in school. My friend Mervyn (Who went on to be the drummer with the Redneck Manifesto, name drop fans) used to give me tapes made up of songs recorded from John Peel and helped shape the more odd side to my taste in music. So one afternoon he handed me a VHS of 120 minutes he’s recorded from MTV. He told me to watch out for a band featured called The God Machine, and it blew my mind. There was some live footage, but the song Home was the one that caught my attention. It was heavy in a way I hadn’t heard before. There was grunge and alt rock in the mix, but it was also metal in a way that I don’t think anyone had done before. So the next time I made the trip to Dublin, I made my pilgrimage to the Sound Cellar to pick up the album.

The God Machine has a very strange history. Originally from San Diego, they ended up living in a squat in Brixton, gigging anywhere that would let them play. They ended up on Fiction Records (Owned by Chris Parry, The Cure’s manager) and started making a name for themselves. Unfortunately, during the recording of their second album, the bass player, Jimmy Fernandez, died of a brain hemorrhage. The band went on to release the songs they had recorded in those sessions as the album One Last Laugh in a Place of Dying, and then broke up. They never played Ireland, so, much to my lifelong disappointment, I never got to see them live.

So what keeps a 34 year old album (ffs) at number one on this list? 

A part of it is nostalgia, but I still haven’t heard anything that sounds like this album. It’s been a big influence on a lot of the bands I’ve come to love over the years and may be to post metal what Slint are to post rock. Or maybe not, I could be projecting, but it certainly sounds like it. Although I’d be a happy man if as many people listen to TGM as listen to Slint these days.

The album starts off with a sample from the film, ‘The Sheltering Sky’ , the same sample Neurosis would use in their album, Enemy Of The Sun a year later, which gives you an idea of the kind of vibe the TGM are going for. It’s played over a single repeated note, some back masked music and some ominous drumming. It’s an unusual start and builds up a sense of anxiousness before the inevitable riffing begins. It’s a hell of an opener, and it sets up the album’s mood well. But the first great song on this album is the second track. The switch up two minutes into She Says is one of the best things in music. From fast paced alt rock to something much slower, almost sludge-like, the song sounds huge, with the bass in danger of causing earthquakes. It is very, very difficult not to play air guitar when this switch happens.    

The Blind Man is a textbook slow moody song that switches up into a metal attack, but it’s not Heavy Metal, there nothing classic about the way the band are playing. Home, the song that first caught my imagination, opens with a sample from the Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares album, and I’d never heard the like of it before. It’s almost alien chanting (at least it was to me) that then leads into the huge riff that starts the song. That sample has been used in lots of things since then, but I honestly had never heard anything like it at the time. The song itself has much more in common with the post metal movement that would start years later with bands like Isis than sounding like Metallica. There’s also music that acts as a precursor to post rock. The five minute improvised noise assault of Temptation is an obvious inspiration for the last 10 minutes of Mogwai’s My Father, My King. 

If side two carried on in the same vein as side one, this would still be a great album. An alt rock / metal crossover before that was a thing, and that would be enough for most bands. But to be number one on this list you have to go well past most bands. Side two heads off in directions that would still be unusual twenty years later.

Ego is a great example of how the band just built their songs. The bass and drums fill the tracks with the guitar adding strange noises and texture when not playing the riff. It makes for a very distinctive sound and this song has one of my favourite quiet LOUD changes of all time.

Seven is probably the most experimental song on the album and diverts from the band’s usual sound into some sort of proto post rock / proto doom jazz, with its dissonant clarinet and eastern soundscapes sprawling out over its seventeen minutes. I’d never heard anything like it and I used to score spooky parts of my Call of Cthulhu scenarios with it. While Seven went mystical, or at least Eastern, Purity draws you in with some gorgeous strings. A chamber quartet slowly pulls you along with its blissful reverie before the drums rattle your skull and the guitar blast you out of your blissful state.  

This is a huge album but once you get to know it, that run time has become something to treasure. Scenes from the Second Story is a band in full on experimental mode, and while a lot of this may not sound that fresh  in 2026 , The God Machine were one of the first bands to mix metal, shoegaze, and alt rock, and in 1992, no one else sounded like this.   

If Therapy? made me realise what can be done if you use the bass and drums to build your songs, it feels like The God Machine perfected it. (Therapy? Are big fans of the God Machine and they had TGM support them several times). Singer / Guitarist, Robin Propper Shepherd went on to form Sophia, who have several great records, but I don’t think anything else can compare to the highs of the two God Machine albums for me. It’s very clear that the remaining band members will never reform, which is a shame. I understand and respect that decision, but as someone who never got to see them live, it would be my ultimate bucket list gig.

Most of the people who have actually heard of TGM will tell you the second album is better and it’s a lot more focused, but Scenes will always be my favourite. This is an album that has never left rotation since I bought it in 1992, and was the only CD I kept when I got rid of my collection. This album changed what I knew as music. Yes, it’s heavy as fuck, but side two took me off on a voyage into musical concepts that I didn’t know were possible. It set me up for post rock when it finally happened and most unexpectedly primed me for a bit of doom jazz. This is an incredibly forward thinking album, seeped in ambition and experimentation, and I’m more than proud to declare this my number one album of all time.  

Seven, if you want an epic song to check out.

Home if you’re looking for something a little more punchy