Gomez

Wed 20th Jul, 2011 in Features

Gomez need no introduction to music aficionados in Australia. With a fan base that is as large and varied as their musical output, they visit our shores knowing that their latest release, Whatever’s On Your Mind will quite possibly be either well accepted and/or tolerated. The majority of the Gomez freaks (and even the newbies) will definitely find the aural make up of these grooves very pleasing.Olly Peacock, the Gomez skins man, caught up with Fasterlouder from his home in Brooklyn, New York, to chat about the seventh Gomez studio album since 1998.

Whatever’s On Your Mind is a collection of songs that were created in a unique format for this band of 15 years. They had the technology and in other ways they needed the space to make it work. Olly was not so sure of this when they started out. “It was all the things it really should not have been. ” he explains “I was a little tense about it and I felt we needed some fucking big songs and we needed to be plugging in some guitars. But when you are five guys sitting around your homes you are not necessarily going to be plugging in your amplifiers and turning them up to 10 and having drums cracking away.”

“I felt a little bit inhibited with it at the time with what I wanted as the sound. The actual process for the most part was good because there was a lot of dedication, in terms of time, and it increased our work ethic. It was also 100% democratic on how these songs were going to work and all had to choose, along with our producer Sam Farrar, on which songs were going to be recorded. So, irrelevant of who wrote them or if they spent three weeks trying to arrange a song it was all based upon the quality of the song. We all found that. Let me say, interesting”.

Didn’t the spontaneity of not being in the same room creating a work or an arrangement make it even harder?
The distance was a good thing because we all had this strong work ethic, that I mentioned, and we tried to present the songs in the best shape that you could. Sometimes the songs would come in and you would think they were a big pile of crap and you were alone so you did not have to say anything to anybody. Other times songs would come in and they would surprise you and you would start working on them right away and add some new bits to it, take some bits away, and get it out as fast as you could. Where is if sometimes you are in a room and you are just bashing out the same chords you can sometimes feel like you are hitting your head against a brick wall.

Ben Ottewell told FL earlier in the year that once the song was sent to the others it was no longer yours. You had to lose your emotional attachment to it and wait for the feedback or lack thereof. So instead the members of Gomez being guarded about their emotions face to face they could choose to respond or not.
After awhile I felt I was evaluating the songs on two very simple things. One, does it make me move emotionally, and second of all, does it make me want to move. I thought, well, if it does not do either of these two things for me, and I would listen to the tracks 2-3 times, then I just did not feel inclined to go on with it. I felt like this was a good rule of thumb to keep doing that. Some of the really good stuff that we developed during this process, that might have made other albums, was falling by the wayside. So it was working, but at times you felt bad that someone spent time on this song but it really did not cut the mustard, and it was not going to get on this record.

With this album out in the market and this new style of writing and recording under their belt, what is the future for Gomez?
This process of doing this record was liberating and exciting and I think we may lean towards this direction in the future. The other idea we have been contemplating and talking about over the last two years or so is that we might play around with the concept of the album. The idea of what a record is these days and how they are sold, whether we make an EP or a single, or just release songs. We have also talked about the idea about whether we do something stylistically and maybe we make three records and each of those records is a certain genre or style. That could be an interesting way for us to play around with just the system of how we release records.

Gomez tour:

Friday 29th July – Tanks Art Centre, Cairns
Saturday 30th July – Splendour in the Grass
Monday 1st August – Metro Theatre, Sydney
Wednesday 3rd August – Factory Theatre, Sydney
Thursday 4th August – Palace Theatre, Melbourne
Saturday 6th August – The Gov, Adelaide
Sunday 7th August – Astor Theatre, Perth