Remember the Alamo! Gomez does. Or, at least they do in spirit, given the polished, Latin-flavored blues that seeps through Bring It On, the band's Virgin Records debut. The album, due out on September 8, is all over the map musically, but saddles up somewhere between a one-horse town on the Tex-Mex border and a porch on the Mississippi Delta. Aside from geography there's nothing too unusual about that -- it's roots-music country, after all. But these five gentlemen, whose average age is twenty-two, are from the North of England. Perhaps reincarnation is the reason.

"That's quite a nice idea," says Ben Ottewell in a guttural, creaky baritone. "...yeah, maybe!" Immortal or not, Ottewell, one of three vocalists, in the band is an old soul. When the dust clears on "Get Miles," Bring It On's wintry opener, you'll swear you've unearthed an aged, 45 record from the era of the civil rights movement, not one of the best -- and strangest -- CDs to come out of Britain this year. What gives?

"It's just the way I sing," says Ottewell. "It's just, wake for the morning, grab a shower and start singing like that."

If only it were that simple. When Ottewell is not raising the dead on vocals, it's likely to be Ian Ball, whose equally brilliant but radically different tunes are sort of how you would expect Beck to sound on quaaludes. There's a reason for that, according to Ottewell. One of Ball's tunes, the laid-back and delicately charming "Whippin' Picadilly" was written on a drunken pilgrimage to a Beck concert in Manchester, England.

"The guys [in the band] went to see Beck and started drinking -- and various other things -- way too soon. The guy who is whippin' Picadilly and whippin' Manchester, he had the idea of taking the drawstring out of his coat and whippin' everyone with it. That's where that came from." Not deep stuff, a fact that Ottewell embraces proudly.

"We're just monkeying about," he says. "[The record] seems to confuse quite a few people. Journalists aren't quite sure where to place it. It's kind of strange that anyone got it."

It's also kind of strange that this sort of southwestern blues was conceived at Sheffield University in Sheffield, England. That's where Ottewell met Ball, drummer Olly Peacock (who was born three days apart from Ball in the same hospital), third vocalist/keyboardist/guitarist Tom Gray and bassist Paul Blackburn. The sound of Gomez didn't evolve either, it's "just how we sound together," says Ottewell.

Part of the dingy feel of Bring It On is no doubt partly due to the conditions in which it was recorded, a bleak, bone-chilling garage in Southport, England. "When it got too cold in the garage we moved to a bedroom," recalls Ottewell. "It was just some demos to see if we could record some tunes together; it kind of worked out, to our surprise." Those demos -- comprised of influences that run the gamut from Coltrane to the Dead to Dr. John -- became, more or less, the finished product. Maybe it is that simple, but where does Gomez fit into the current British music scene?

"We don't."

KEVIN RAUB
(August 21, 1998)