Like mad scientists, Gomez have been trying to concoct a hybrid of Britpop and American roots music for more than a decade now, to varying degrees of success. Their debut, Bring It On, which beat out Pulp's This Is Hardcore and Cornershop's When I Was Born for the 7th Time for the 1998 Mercury Prize, seemingly set a blueprint for future experimentation with a shaggy-haired combination that sounded raw yet ambitious, unforced yet focused. On their too-quick follow-up, 1999's Liquid Skin, Gomez buffed away most of the rough edges and derived a glossier, showier sound. They had lost the plot: The band was supposed to take over the world, not continue tinkering in the lab. In the meantime, that sophomore album has become Gomez's default setting: Even when they pushed reset on 2004's Split the Difference, their first collaboration with an outside producer, they couldn't escape the slick elements that were beginning to appear intrinsic to the project all along.
A New Tide, their sixth studio album, promises yet another reinvigorated approach, but that title is about as far as they get. For a band with more than a decade under its belt, Gomez still seem to be working with a simple formula that applies studio sheen to rustic music-- or maybe it's rustic elements to studio rock. "Little Pieces" threads blues guitar riffs throughout an otherwise anonymous rocker, and "Other Plans" devolves into a vague raga jam with Beatlesque backward loops. "Boned Tired" mixes acoustic guitar and mouth harp with electronic hums and beats. It's actually a pretty neat trick that reveals the sonic similarities between the new and the traditional, the organic and the synthetic, but it still sounds like a trick. The electronic elements here pop up so surreptitiously that that they come off like shorthand for innovative rather than innovation itself.
There are, especially toward the end of A New Tide, some nice moments that show a potentially compelling band behind the transatlantic formula. A buoyant organ theme mingles with an upright bass on the whirling dervish "If I Ask You Nicely", and "Natural Reaction" catches a breeze with its windblown hook, chiming marimba, and clattering outro. "Airstream Driver" rockets along on a catchy hook and a quick tempo that makes it ideal for a road-trip mixtape, but it eventually devolves, as most Gomez songs do, into a coda jam that's heavy on rumbling bass but low on gas. The band has always taken liberties with conventional song structures, and that's one of the reasons their 2005 double-live Out West holds up surprisingly well. They take no small joy in defying expectations, in baiting and switching, in playing around with genres and instruments, if not necessarily with formulas. But on A New Tide, the abrupt tempo changes and style shifts no longer sound subversive or even very much fun, but overthought and perhaps even obligatory. It's a showy album with very little to show.
