Gomez - 'Split The Difference' (Hut)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Some people you just can't imagine ever having been young. Tom Waits, for example - surely he was always, always at least fifty years old? Pictures of youthful Johnny Cash are, you will agree, somehow much more disturbing than the cracked face of the old geezer we came to know in the later years. Bruce Springsteen too; surely nobody actually named a baby 'Bruce'? Of course not, he's always been a middle-aged man. Similarly with Gomez - undoubtedly the world's most elderly band of young students ever.
Just that voice that growls its way in a mere twenty seconds into opener 'Do One', that voice that sounds as if it's seen too much, the world-weary husk, the warm crackle. From a bloke who's really quite young, too. Usually, you could say a similar thing about the entire Gomez sound. With that excellent first record 'Bring It On', yes, you could trace it back to delta blues - but they still made it sound exciting. From there on in, it got sadly dull all too quickly. Moments of inspiration, yes, but little of consistent intrigue. That is (yeah, you saw it coming), until now.
'Split The Difference' is the first time you can mark off a real progression in the Gomez sound - mainly because (apart from that voice and one or two retreats into familiar territory), it largely sounds nothing like Gomez. Hell, this rocks - get a load of recent single 'Silence' and try telling us it could have fitted on any other of their EPs. They're discovering that straight-up rock and roll can please them as much as weird blues twiddling, and it's an air of fun that translates through the band into the listener most effectively. Not a band at their most complex, but a band in a great frame of mind.
They've got daring, too. The bass sound on an ace 'We Don't Know Where We're Going' could be nicked from a Mclusky record, the percussion amidst the eerie grandness of 'Meet Me In The City' possibly utilising human-bones. Isn't it great to hear experiments that work? Even the highpoint, the centrepiece, the bit to restore faith in a dwindling future (that'll be recent single 'Catch Me Up', which is marvellous) is vaguely courageous in that if it's trying to please a fan-base, its sumptuously straightforward, simplistically melodic tone might not be exactly what the faithful had ordered. But if it's an attempt to win over (or, indeed, win back) those who aren't ardent admirers, then job very well done.
Of course, it's not faultless - 'Extra Special Guy' is a little too pedestrian, 'Where Ya Going' just that tad too fuzzy for its own good, but it's the closest they've come to a really cracking album since their debut. They're not knocking us off our feet, but it's nice to hear them being made to tap again.
Artists in this article: Gomez
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