It’s Getting Better All the Time

Gomez
In Our Gun

(Virgin Records/Virgin Records America, Inc.)

www.gomez.co.uk

release date: March 18, 2002, UK/March 19,2002, US

I may well be the only human being on the entire face of the earth who actually owns a copy of Gomez’s throwaway 2001 release Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline. This is because I have unwittingly become a Gomez completist, a freak collector, a fount of weird trivia about the band and unabashedly insanely crazy about the weird band with the weird singer who have weird shows. Yeah, I even had to have their cover of the Beatles song, used in the Phillips commercials.

When I went to a show of theirs two years ago, my friends all hated Gomez, and loved the opening band, whom I found so boring that I wanted to crawl off somewhere and nap. To this day, I am informed that Gomez were just too “jammy” and that wasn’t meant in the English sense, but in the Dead-Phish sense.

Weird, jammy Gomez, with the weird show, and their lone weird fan.

They also make weird records, and folks, Gomez have managed to both continue to push the artistic envelope yet make themselves more accessible simultaneously with their third album release.

In Our Gun opens with a neat piece of near Brit-pop, “Shot Shot”, which clocks in at just over two minutes, and is apparently the tale of a hit man; it would be good solid pop until the twisted sax and the weird theramin are thrown into the mix which make it just plain strange.

Gomez have three lead vocalists: Tom Gray sounds the most “traditionally acceptable” of them, the sweetest voiced; Ian Ball and Ben Ottewell both growl to some degree, Ball to a lesser degree: check him out on “Shot Shot” and the carnivalesque and hilariously macabre tale of drug withdrawal “Ruff Stuff”, with its pleas of “come back darlin’” while he growls about giving up fags, drugs, smack pubs---easily one of the strongest pop songs on the album, slamming to a shut, rather than a close, after a measly two minutes and 20 seconds.

Ottewell has lead duty on better than half the material here, with his two-packs-and-a-liter soaked trademark vocal cords doing the band well, as usual. Gomez don’t sound like any other band around in part because of Ottewell’s voice.
While he’s been compared repeatedly to Joe Cocker, it can’t do him justice---there’s great subtlety in Ottewell’s voice, which Cocker always lacked in his gravel. Ottewell never sounds strained, just sincere. He opens his mouth, and the sounds pour out this way. Best performances in the whole of “Even Song”, “1000 Times” and the chorus of “Sound of Sounds”.

The greatest song here, overall, is “Ping One Down”, with its handclaps and goofy unintelligible chorus; also the aforementioned “Shot Shot” and “Ruff Stuff” for pure pop-ishness. “Mile’s End”, about a womanizer running into his last days as a Casanova owing to age, it would seem, is interesting lyrically. The entire album, as is always the case with any Gomez record, is awash with any and every conceivable instrument one could dream up. Also sampled horn sections that have been muffled, muffled background vocals in some choruses, background vocalists, and probably pots and pans being thrown in the kitchen. Moreover, they are a tight band of proficient musicians---there is genuine complexity here, even when the band is working in their simplest mode.

What’s interesting is to take out Gomez’s 1998 debut Bring It On, then Liquid Skin, from 2000 and maybe lodge the outtakes and throwaways from “…Hotline” in between those, and play this one after all of those, and watch the band expand artistically, yet retain their cohesiveness.
Gomez is another of those artists I can add to my list of bands and artists I desperately can’t wait to have new records from because it’s like having Christmas or getting birthday presents: I never know what to expect, and I am rarely, if ever, even slightly disappointed. It will take something extraordinary and breathtaking to remove In Our Gun from the top spot of my 2002 list, and it’s not even summer yet.

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