“The process was really good, it was surprisingly very liberating. It forced us to have a very, very strong work ethic. For me, I was getting up in the morning and working eight to twelve hours on a song every day. And we were trying to compose two songs each, each week,” he explains.
Having been around for 15 years and previously recording six long-players, it would be reasonable to believe Gomez had established a particular process when it came to recording new tunes. But members of the band are now living across two continents, and thus they had to adapt and create a new approach to sharing ideas for their latest album – Whatever’s On Your Mind. The band – composed of members Ian Ball, Paul Blackburn, Tom Gray, Ben Ottewell and Olly Peacock – were able to utilise the internet to form an online file-swapping method to share their individual demos, enabling them to work despite their physical separation.
“We did a little bit of that on the previous album, A New Tide. But that was only with a couple of the members and this time round it was all five of us…we could all see exactly the same files. It would then be open to us whether we chose to work on them, or whether we didn’t…it made us work harder to the point where we weren’t gonna go to the studio unless we had about fourteen songs we knew we finished,” he describes of the process.
However, akin to the adage that “a camel is a horse designed by a committee”, this method is somewhat susceptible to producing a pastiche of incompatible ideas that complement each other less than morbid obesity complements pole-dancing. In order to produce a coherent record, this approach requires a group with considerable experience and talent, qualities that Gomez can rightly confess to.
Peacock speaks to me from his home in New York, recently returned from a tour of the UK. He speaks about the album passionately and, despite extensive recent touring, is upbeat about the upcoming tour of US and Australia. “Yeah, it’s been pretty consistent for over a year…we’ve been working incredibly hard on the songs and the actual album and then all the lead up to getting everything out, which obviously consists of getting the artwork done and a lot of work on redesigning some of the old songs for the tour. There’s been a lot of build-up for a while, so we’re in proper, full, Gomez mode.”
Despite this frenzied schedule, he dismisses any notion of slowing down. “There’ll be just a slight recuperation, trying to get my shit together, basically just take a couple of days, and then back to reworking some new songs for the tour.”
Gomez appear to possess a special affinity for Australia, having toured here extensively the past ten years. They celebrated the 10th anniversary of their debut album – Bring It On – by travelling to Australia and performing the record in its entirety. Released in 1998, Bring It On sent Gomez to the world stage quicker than the image of Tony Abbott in speedos sent an entire nation into embarrassed shock. The album won the highly prestigious Mercury Prize that year, beating out other UK artists such as Massive Attack and The Verve while joining previous recipients such as Pulp and Portishead. With every album release since, the band have expanded their sound and delved deeper into their influences, triggering an exploration into numerous genres. Whatever’s On Your Mind stretches their pop sound by combining hints of folk, blues and whatever else was on their mind at the time, which judging by the lyrics may have been The Bold & The Beautiful.
While the album has received mixed to positive reviews from critics the employment of clichéd lyrics limit the album’s ability to defend itself against critics from Pitchfork and the like. The lyrics are particularly vulnerable to criticism considering the intriguing lyrics on Ben Ottewell’s solo album, Shapes & Shadows, and the band’s earlier material.
Regardless of this, there is always an exciting charm to the live Gomez show that Australians will be treated to in early August, and hardcore fans can expect some modification of their earlier work. “We’ve been…redesigning, reworking, recomputing and modifying them for our own enjoyment and hopefully for everyone else’s,” Peacock explains. Their visit to Australia seems timely in that the band will have had time playing overseas to experiment in translating the new songs onto the stage. “Some songs can go there pretty fast. It’s usually a man-power question: sometimes we can’t actually physically play all the instruments that are on the song. We’ve experienced this for a long time so we have to kind of use computers and samples and do a lot work there, so we just have to decide what we could do, what we couldn’t…so far they’re getting pretty good. There’s a little bit of movement until they’re in their actual prime, which will definitely be in time for Australia which is great. It’s exciting and nice to record these songs and see the reaction from people when you play them live.”
