(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Gomez are a British quintet who emerged with Bring It On (Virgin, 1998), an album dedicated to a pop-psych, amateurish reinterpretationabove all, adapted to modern collage-style production techniquesof the songwriter blues-rock once played by Ry Cooder and Tom Waits. On one side, two guitars engage in Delta-worthy trills with a raspy, scratchy vocal register; on the other, theres a continuous invasion of eccentric sounds (horns, distorted organ, exotic percussion). Half of these are simple accumulations of clichs, and the other half are trendy sounds (keyboard chirps reminiscent of synthesizers, ambient guitar drones, etc.).
For every track like Get Miles, which genuinely sweats the anguish of the blues, theres one like 78 Stone Wobble, merely a disguise for a chart-ready chorus (almost like John Lennons Day In The Life), relying on arrangement gimmicks (sinister fuzz, filtered vocals, metallic slide, dixieland orchestra tail); for every Love Is Better Than A Warm Trombone that sets up an affectionate period vignette in the style of Taj Mahal, theres a folk-rock nursery rhyme like Whippin Piccadilly based on a playful approach (skiffle and ragtime cadence, video game music box, electronic fart rhythms); for every dragging blues like Ries Wagon, theres a slow cocktail-lounge ballad like Bubble Gum Years. Half the tracks act as a laxative, meant to make digestible the other half of entirely insignificant tracks, pale revivals of country-rock ballads. And half the tracks are simple laxatives to help digest the preceding ones.
As often happens with phenomena hyped by the British media, the idea isnt particularly original (hundreds of American bands have reworked the blues in a ragged, personal way), but it is repeated ad nauseam, and in the end the only aspect truly worth noticing is the sound engineers skill in blending the arrangements.
Liquid Skin (Virgin, 1999) is even worse: a mass of clichs lazily borrowed from Band and Tom Waits (Devil Will Ride). The more conventional songs seem to harken back to 1960s blue-eyed soul. There are literally thousands of bands like this around the world.
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
The excellent EP Machismo (Virgin, 2000) contains the ballads
Do's And Don'ts (the blues via Tim Buckley)
and Machismo (dub reverbs over hip hop beats),
and the 13-minute psychedelic jam The Dajog Song.
Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline (Hut, 2000) is a collection of
leftovers, rarities and outtakes, including the anthemic
Bring Your Lovin' Back Here and the 13-minute psychedelic suite
The Dajon' Song.
Annoyingly, In Our Gun (Virgin, 2002) offers more of the same and the
quality is not much higher than the leftovers released on Hotline.
Basically, there is no difference between a Gomez leftover and finished Gomez
song. If they had made only one album instead of three, that album would be
worth listening. Make it an EP and it would be a promising debut.
Alas, diluted over the course of three albums their art is simply tedious.
Other that aiming for the charts with a much more commercial and upbeat
sound (Shot Shot), there is little here that is worth listening to
more often than Britney Spears. And, if nothing else, Britney Spears is cute.
Continuing the slide into irrelevance,
Split The Difference (Virgin, 2004) offers another parade of cliches
taken from the most stereotyped bands of Brit-pop.
Even when they rock out (Don't Know Where Were Going, Chicken Out, Do One), they sound anemic.
Their mediocrity is epitomized by opener Do One, which is only three minutes
long but feels like an eternity; which makes the six-minute
Sweet Virginia the pop-blues equivalent of Chinese torture.
Out West (ATO, 2005) is a double-disc live album.
How We Operate (ATO, 2006) is a collection of stale, predictable songs,
the least tedious being perhaps Tom Gray's Girlshapedlovedrug.
A New Tide (ATO, 2009) is another album built around a general idea
of a song that never materializes into a song but only into that recursive
general idea. It's not even background muzak, just annoying rehearsals for
something that is never delivered.
Ditto for Whatever's On Your Mind (2011).
