Gomez: Gun For It.

Gomez

In Our Gun is in stores now.

“I am officially in the middle of bloody nowhere in England,” laughs Gomez’s Ian Ball, obviously jealous of out Brisbane climate. Can you blame him?

“Well somewhere near kind the very centre of the middle of nowhere. It’s a very English grey day today.”

English and grey, however, the music of Gomez is not. In fact, it’s a polar opposite, excuse the cold weather pun. Over the course of two albums and a disc of B-sides, Gomez established themselves as musical tour de force, drawing influences from funk, soul, swampy blues and roots with a dash of psychedelia, served up in a manner simply overflowing with self confidence. While there’s a round about cliché having something to do with expecting the unexpected, Gomez still surprise, once again throwing their musical punches from left field.

Just on four years since the release of their first single 78 Stone Wobble, their third studio album In Our Gun finds it’s way into stores. From the opening track Shot Shot (which may owe a little to the musical territory ploughed by Morphine) to the albums closer, the brilliantly titled Ballad Of Nice & Easy, Gomez wade through acoustic guitars, gruff vocals, drum machines, samples, and pretty much anything else that happens to take their fancy. And it almost didn’t happen.

“We’re still trying to get our shit together,” Ian explains, the band having taken a forced hiatus from the rigours of performing. Or even associating with each other, for that matter...

“The shows we’re doing are actually the first ones we’ve done since the last shows we did in Australia. We played Festival Hall in Brisbane. That’s the bugger. That tour was the last thing we did as a band.”

“After that tour we’d been on the road for four years, and we were just fucked. Basically we were on the verge of just breaking down and killing each other. I actually moved to Sydney for three months, which was fucking tremendous. I lived in North Bondi. Spent some time on Stradbroke Island for a few weeks. Fishing, sitting on my arse. It was great.”

“That’s when my song writing actually came back. I just lost it being on tour all the time, but everything just came out and I wrote shit loads of songs in like a week. I don’t know, I was just in a really good mood.”

“We got back together, basically to see if we still liked each other, figure out if we wanted to do it any more. We spent a month in this house I’m at now. We didn’t want to spend a lot making a record again, so we bought some digital recording gear and did a month, took a month off, all in all it took us three months to do, but it was three months over six months if you know what I mean.”

Such a staggered recording process meant thoughts could be gathered and ideas developed between recording sessions. It also meant that the record grew at it’s own pace, and even enabled band members to experiment within a track without involving everyone in the process.

“The digital machines were brilliant. You could just pack up and go and record outside, they can all operate together, so you’d often end up recording a track with different people. We were very rarely all in the same room; someone would go and work on this over here or work on something else. It was kind of a workshop type vibe.”

All this, of course, makes matters quite difficult when it comes to actually sitting down and working out how to perform the material live.

“We’re actually trying to work out how the hell we’re going to play them. Some of them are going very well, and some of them we gave up as soon as we tried,” he laughs. “There’s too much shit on there for six men to do. It’s not physically possible.”

Something that has also been an issue for the band on albums past. It’s seems odd really, considering how live and jammed out Gomez sound on record.

“Well we didn’t (jam),” he laughs. “The last record, Liquid Skin, we actually couldn’t play five or six songs, we just didn’t know how to do it. We just gave up. This time is a bit easier, because we’re more into it now. Some of the songs are actually really easy, dead simple. It’s just when we’re using loads of computers or drum machines it’s difficult. We don’t just want to press a button and hit go and stand there, you know.”

Regardless of it’s origins, one thing seemingly defines the Gomez listening experience. In Our Gun is undoubtedly a very organic sounding record.

"Thanks. I don’t know how we did it… People have mentioned that things like the drum machines don’t sound cold and machine like. I think the trick is to just put a shaker on it,” he laughs. “Then it just sounds organic.”

“We don’t really give a shit at the end of the day, you know,” he ponders in closing. “As long as it sounds good, who cares?”