There can be few bands as successful and yet anonymous as Gomez. With sales past the two million mark and four studio albums to their credit, they remain a mainstay of festival line-ups around the world but would be hard-pushed to turn heads on public transport. Maybe that’s the way they like it, but it might also be their fatal flaw.
Since their Mercury Music Prize-bagging debut “Bring It On” back in 1998, Gomez's inspired fusion of electro squelches and down-home blues rock has seen arguably less interesting bands steam ahead with units shifted and celebrity attained. But then Travis, say, Coldplay and now Keane all have a discernable frontman and not an amorphous line of brown-haired men in jeans and t-shirts. Gomez’s policy of sharing lead vocals between Tom Gray, Ben Ottewell and Ian Ball has meant there’s no single, tabloid-identifiable face to the band. No Fran, no Chris, no Tom nice-not-thin… no popular interest.
They’ve nonetheless carved out a niche as an exemplary live act – a Grateful Dead for Café Nero kids – for whom every track is delivered like an encore, and tonight they continue to give great show. Even though “Split The Difference” material is odd, a cross between Mike Nesmith’s Monkees songs and George Formby that often sounds more like The Coral than Gomez, singles-to-date “Catch Me Up” and “Silence” are solid additions to the live canon. It’s almost a Greatest Hits set already, from the epic roar of “Bring It On” to the enduringly lusty crowd-pleaser “Get Myself Arrested”.
The lighters are out for the politically-minded “In Our Gun” (unlike the band themselves, their audiences seem to lack irony), their ‘pinched from the Pixies’ dynamics inspires squeals from giddy female fans and Tom’s ‘demi-Bez’ shuffling between stints on the keyboards is applauded. De facto sixth member and percussion king Dajon Everett even gets out from behind the bongos to play guitar on the song he co-wrote, rousing new album opener “Do One” (about a crappy package holiday).
They race to the finish of each song and, beset as they are with technical glitches, often give the feel that this is a ramshackle jam rather than a long-rehearsed show (in fact, they were in North America earlier in the year and have an Australian tour, Glastonbury and Lollapalooza yet to come). But that’s all part of the act.
It seems shabby, but they’re impressively adept; they sometimes sound drunk but they’re never off-key or behind the beat. They’re no thinner, hipper or better-dressed than when they first emerged – who is? – but then, reliability, that most un-rock’n’roll of attributes, has always been their strongest suit.
