Some bands put out an album and leave their fans satisfied and hungry for more. Then there are bands that manage to make a good album, while simultaneously beating their sound to death and leaving their audience quite overfed. If 2004's superb Split the Difference had been Gomez's last album, I would have thought, "They were a good band, but I'd had enough anyway." But it was not to be. Just like grandma at Thanksgiving dinner they insisted, "C'mon, you're not full yet, have another helping!"
How We Operate is the British quintet's fifth full-length studio release, and while not being a bad album, it gives the world a Gomez fix that won't wear off any time soon.
Gomez is led by a songwriting duo that takes turns on lead vocals a la … um … The Beatles. Tom Gray is the one with the dime-a-dozen indie voice. He's the sensitive pop visionary of the two. Ben Ottewell is … well … I'm finding it exceedingly difficult to be subtle here, so I'm just going to say it: I hate that man's voice. It's that faux-raspy, Eddie Vedder meets Scott Stapp meets whoever the hell The Calling's lead singer is. To the novice Gomez listener, Ottewell's vocals sound out of place. They don't belong in an underground band that's trying to maintain a shred of credibility. But I guess you just have to get used to it — appreciate the melody, not the medium. His songs are often powerful and contain bouts of experimentalism that give Gomez an edge on their soft-rock peers.
Speaking of soft rock, How We Operate is the pinnacle of Gomez's embrace of the genre. Gone are their extended jams, drumbeats played backwards, techno-rock tendencies, or any of the other quirky oddities that used to make their music interesting. It's as if the band was at a crossroads and could have gone the direction of their more dark, menacing songs like Split the Difference's "We Don't Know Where We're Going," but instead took the road most traveled to easy listening, catchy, potential radio hits. To put it quite simply: this is the weakest album Gomez has ever made.
Some songs work, while others are just plain sappy.
The bouncy, feel-good "Hamoa Beach" shows signs of hope. A chorus with Gray (thankfully not Ottewell) urging an unknown "you" to conquer his fear of change and get out of a stale relationship is accompanied by what sounds like a lap steel guitar wired to a wah-wah pedal.
But then comes "Girlshapedlovedrug" — a bland, insubstantial bore of a pop song. Its cliché "stop music while singer says first line of chorus, then come crashing in at last word" arrangement sounds like the Gin Blossoms and Everclear had a talentless lovechild. And like so many bands before them, Gomez chose this, one of their album's worst songs, to serve as their single. Good job, guys.
The album also shows a shift toward a new, bluegrass/country-infused Gomez. There is a great deal of slide guitar present as opposed to past albums. "Woman! Man!," a song that is redeemed by its title, displays the album's desired "hipster honky-tonk" sound. Its "Sha la la la" chorus is the second or third time on the disc that Gomez uses that tired, played-out musical onomatopoeia.
Sometimes the shallowness of the album seems intentional and ironic. This justification, sadly, falls flat in "Cry on Demand," the chorus of which would fit in nicely on a new Hillary Duff album. When an A-rate lyricist like, say, Jeff Tweedy, says a superficial line like "That's how you fight loneliness/ just smile all the time," it is comical in the context of a poetically written song and, in effect, gains more meaning. When Tom Gray says, "Sometimes I wish I could cry on demand. Boo hoo, boo hoo," it just sounds like he was running out of gas and settled on his filler lyrics. But even this song, one of record's more revolting numbers, ends up being saved by a catchy Brit-pop hook.
Most Gomez albums have one great song that eclipses the rest. Liquid Skin had "We Haven't Turned Around," In Our Gun had the title track and Split the Difference had the epic ballad "Sweet Virginia." How We Operate does away with this monarchist trend and takes a more communist approach: there are no really great or monstrously crappy songs; rather, they all kind of hover around mediocrity.
I've been a Gomez fan for a long time but have never truly been able to make it all the way through one of their albums. How We Operate is no different. Despite a few tweaks here and there, the album does indeed have a very Gomez feel to it, which is admirable but exactly what I was dreading at the same time.
Grade: 2.5 out of 5
