Gomez: Split the Difference

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Returning to play on the back of this, their fourth album after a brilliant performance in 2000, English quintet Gomez seemed to have fired up their blues-soaked folk-rock into their most direct album yet.

The lateral-minded weirdness of 2002 predecessor In Our Gun left many nonplussed (thought it terrific myself) so this might be the album on which they get their pop mojo working at last. That's especially true on the Beatles thumper Silence, the McCartneyesque Sweet Virginia, the skiffle-rock of Catch Me Up or the Motown groove of Meet Me In the City.

Though, when Gomez and producer Tchad Blake go a bit nuts on the mixing desk, the extreme-panned acoustic guitars and electronics of We Don't Know We're Going - think Radiohead stuck in a Mexican jail - suggests they haven't lost their urge to experiment.

COMPILATION CORNER: A quick dip through the recycled and the reassembled bins ... Wave of Mutilation: Best of by the Pixies (4AD, ) is bit of an event as a compilation, given the legendary left-field American band's reunion and lasting influence on a couple of generations of bands since. Within are 23 tracks tracing the Boston-bred group's arc from 1987's Come on Pilgrim EP through to their bow-out after 1991's Trompe Le Monde. Of course any serious rock collection requires ownership of 1989's classic Doolittle which dominates this with six songs. But it's a rigorously good collection by a band who were guitar pop's answer to David Lynch and helped to make Spanish the official second language of rock ... not quite as consequential a band but affectionately remembered in these parts for their cover of Caravan of Love which soundtracked a Telecom campaign, The Housemartins get a posthumous Best Of (Mercury, ) with their 14 generally infectious fey tracks showing they were a possible missing link between the Smiths and Blur. Some of them went on to greater heights (one became Fatboy Slim, two went to The Beautiful South) but most of their bantamweight Britpop still stands up today.


Label: Hut