The Review - MUSIC - grooves with ROISIN GADELRAB Published: 11 September 2008
Gomez’s Ben Ottewell at his bluesey best
Bring it back: Gomez return with a classic album
REVIEW: GOMEZ The Forum
A LESSER band than Gomez might quake at the risky prospect of playing a 10-year-old album from start to finish, live and in order.
But then Gomez is no ordinary band.
They defied all attempts to pigeonhole them when they first brought out the Mercury Music Prize-winning masterpiece, Bring it On, a decade ago and although their star was never brighter than at that time, they proved at The Forum last week that their debut album has stood the test of time.
Never mind that Southport’s finest musical exports don’t look a day older and don’t seem to have updated their wardrobe either. While Ian Ball (vocals/guitar) still looks and sounds like a shy innocent 16-year-old, if it could be possible, frontman Ben Ottewell’s gravelly blues-laden vocals have matured so far now that they could easily belong to a cigar-smoking New Orleans pensioner.
The only danger with playing an album in full is that you can’t mess with the order, hence the hits came and went early on in the set.
But Gomez were never about hits.
They worked simply because their complex arrangements, heavy instrumentals and spine-tingling vocals combined into an incredible manifestation of musical minds melting.
So when they reached the final song on the album, Rie’s Wagon, Ottewell’s tortured soul telling how he has “credit with the medicine man”, the instrumental dissolving into a grimy wall of sound, it was a fitting note to end on.
Except for the encore, which included a couple of new tunes, which have far too much to history to measure up to, and the beautiful and much missed, We Haven’t Turned Around, from their second album, Liquid Skin. It was a rare privilege to see Gomez at their finest back on stage, clearly revelling in the opportunity to jam, reminisce and mess around with their previous classics.
An evening not to be forgotten easily.
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