Gomez

ATO recording group Gomez strike out for heretofore uncharted territory with their ambitious new album, "A NEW TIDE." The album -- Gomez's sixth studio recording -- marks a return to the British band's more exploratory roots, with songs like "Mix" and "Airstream Driver" evincing a spirit born of freewheeling imagination and a longstanding collaborative relationship. With its experimental rhythms and richly woven orchestrations, "A NEW TIDE" is among Gomez's finest works to date, a panoramic collection of exuberant, expansive songs, crafted with extraordinary heart and ingenuity.

"It's definitely the most musical record we've made in terms of the thought and the care that's gone into the arrangements," says vocalist/guitarist Ben Ottewell. "There's a real attention to detail, which I think is beautiful."

"We're playing with sounds again," says drummer Olly Peacock. "We've learnt loads of new tricks, so we're having a lot of fun."

Gomez has stood apart from their very beginning just over a decade ago, earning critical praise and an ever-growing fanbase for their eclectic and ambitious musical tack. The bandmates' lives underwent a number of seismic changes in the time following 2006's "HOW WE OPERATE." They are now scattered across two continents. Peacock resides in Brooklyn; vocalist/guitarist Ian Ball lives in L.A.; bassist Paul Blackburn makes his home in Detroit; only Ottewell and vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist Tom Gray remain in England, both living in Brighton. What's more, Ottewell and Gray both became dads, while Peacock and Blackburn put an end to their bachelor lifestyles by getting married.

"The whole living all over the place and the distance apart is kind of healthy in some ways," Peacock says. "It conjures up newer sounds and perspectives on things. It just keeps things exciting. The stuff that Tom and Ben might be hearing in England might be very different from what I'm involved with in the States."

Living apart revivified the Mercury Music Prize-winning band's creativity, prompting the birth of individual ideas over potentially constricted groupthink. They dealt with what Ottewell calls "a logistical nightmare" by recording fragments of songs -- melodies, beats, guitar licks, etc -- on portable studios in their respective homes. From there, they exchanged files online, using technology to traverse the physical distance which separated them. Peacock took the helm in the band's "wireless jamming," Ottewell explains, noting that he himself is "a little bit of a Luddite when it comes to that kind of thing."

"A couple of years ago it would've been a bit more longwinded and difficult," says Peacock. "This time around it meant that we were coming into the studio with half-finished songs."

In September of 2008, Gomez officially convened at Dave Matthews' state-of-the-art recording studio deep in the Virginia hills, 15 minutes outside Charlottesville, Virginia. There the band engaged in two weeks' worth of much-needed woodshedding, a process, Ottewell says, which essentially entailed "getting drunk and playing music together."

"We were sitting around, playing guitars," he recalls. "It was far too hot in the day so you'd just sleep most of the day, and then you'd be out there, on the porch, in the evening, playing along with the crickets."

December saw the band spending two weeks in a Los Angeles studio, laying down a series of early tracks. In April of 2009, Gomez reunited in Chicago to officially begin work in earnest with producer Brian Deck behind the board. Known for his production of such disparate but like-minded artists as Modest Mouse, Iron and Wine, and Counting Crows, Deck proved an ideal foil for Gomez, a savvy sounding board for their many musical initiatives.

"Brian let us run with stuff," Peacock says. "He's very much of an experimental mindset and just let us do what we wanted to do, really. It was very easy working with him, a really natural pairing straight off."

"You want someone in the studio you can bounce your ideas off," Ottewell says, "somebody you get along with, and somebody who's not afraid to speak up when you don't seem to get it right. We're not too precious about it. There's not a great deal of ego in this band. We know it's a collaborative thing. If you're in a band you've got to, not so much compromise, but you've got to know how you complement each other and how that works."

While much of the material was born of technology, one of Gomez's greatest strengths has always been its sense of traditionalism. Working in the main studio space, band members replaced many of the synths and programming of the initial home recordings with traditional instrumentation. Meanwhile, additional computers and various electronic "toys" were tracked in another part of the studio, dubbed "The Kraftwerk World."

"Whilst main tracks were going down, either me and Ian or just ourselves individually were working on stuff for that track or another song," Peacock says. "There were always kind of simultaneous recordings going on."

As ever, a wide range of styles were incorporated into Gomez's matchless brew. The sound of swinging sixties mod-pop adds buoyancy to the Tom Gray-penned "If I Ask You Nicely," whileflavors of Delta blues, psychedelia, electric dub, and Krautrock all come into play on intricately textured songs such as "Very Strange" and "Little Pieces." Peacock specifically cites Neu! and the Notwist as particular inspirations on the album's elaborate rhythmic base.

"They come out in subtle ways," Peacock explains, "maybe in groove-orientated things, maybe in some of the electronics we've been doing nowadays. But for a lot of people hearing it, they'd probably be like, 'Oh. Never would've got that.'"

"It's just down to what's exciting us and where the aesthetic leads us," Ottewell says of Gomez' variegated inspirations. "What I'm really happy about is that a lot of the songs retain that folk element that I've been quite into. There's a lot of finger-picking. The electronics don't invade it in a personal way. They really kind of add to it, make it warmer."

"If we like a bit of everything, that kind of filters into the music in some way and hopefully results in something original," says Peacock.

To add even further diversity of sound, Gomez invited contributions from a cast of illustrious guest musicians, including bassist Josh Abrams (The Roots, Sam Prekop, Godspeed You Black Emperor!), cellist Oliver Krauss (David Gray, Paul Weller, Beth Orton), and multi-instrumentalist Stuart Bogie of Brooklyn's world renowned Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra.

"We were literally squeezing in people whenever we could do," Peacock says, "getting them in and getting it sorted in some way."

Perhaps the most striking cameo comes from vocalist Amy Milan, of Stars/Broken Social Scene fame, who trills on the beguiling "Win Park Slope."

"We always wanted to have her come and work with us in some capacity," Peacock says, "but it never worked out that we were all in the same place at the same time. She was playing with Stars in Los Angeles so Ian went down there after soundcheck and had about 30 minutes with her and got it done backstage there."

"She's just a fucking great singer," gushes Ottewell. "It's great to get a female voice on the record. We've been tempted to do it for so long, but it never really happened for some reason. I used to do all the chick vocals, but I've lost the gift."

More than two dozen tracks were ultimately recorded. As the band whittled away at the wealth of material, a number of new songs emerged, including "Airsteam Driver" and "Natural Reaction," two tunes which stand out among the album's inventive high water marks.

"They were done on the very, very last session," Peacock says. "We had what we thought were the definite 12 or 13 songs going on there, and then it was like, 'Hold on a second, we've got these other ones that are really great.' It was always evolving, all the way to literally the last week or so."

"A NEW TIDE" finds Gomez operating at the peak of its creative powers, the band members' willingness to take artistic chances resulting in a musically mischievous and remarkably progressive collection.

"I just had such a good time making this record," Ottewell says. "It was hard to be away from the kids, but it was just a lot of fun. I just got a lot out of it, I felt fulfilled after we'd finished it. Things don't always turn out quite the way you want it to, but this one, it's like, that's what I want this band to be doing."

"This record is the sound of a band pushing things forward," Peacock enthuses, "doing new and novel experiments and interesting sounds. We're not a band that can make the same record over and over, even if it might be successful. It's just not in our DNA, as it were.

"The next time I want it to be more extreme again," he avows. "It has to always be moving forward, otherwise there's just no point."