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While the mostly mid-tempo, mostly acoustic continues the trajectory from college rock to radio-ready adult alternative, Gomez has yet to succumb to anything resembling blandness. The album’s best songs are its most experimental, which will continue to frustrate those who want these Southport boys to more frequently embrace the strange.
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Gomez ups the musical ante with A New Tide, a brilliant 11-song collection of lyrical jewels embellished by colorful and unusual textural arrangements that a dynamics-loving jazz band could admire.
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Their latest, A New Tide, is their most accessible set yet.
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Album-closer 'Sunset Gates' gives Ottewell the final word, one he shares with promenading stand-up bass, pulsing guitar counterpoints, and a climactic jam crescendo driven by Peacock’s eternal fills and blaring horns that sputter like wounded hawks plunging from the hardscrabble sky. And so ends another Gomez album, a very fine one.
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On the laidback, spaced-out strength of A New Tide, they’re still as pleasantly beguiling as they were 11 years ago.
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Recorded in Chicago and Charlottesville, Virginia, A New Tide cobbles together elements of those scenes, but it ultimately lacks identity; it strives for diversity at the cost of imagination and quality songwriting.
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There is some nice arrangements here, even if too many of the tracks sound like they belong on some type of chillout/easy listening compilation.
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A New Tide also contains some of the band's most straightforward material yet.
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MojoMostly A New Tide is high on big tunes and low on character. [May 2009, p.108]
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UncutHints of "The Basement Tapes" glimmer through pieces like 'Win Park Slope' or 'Airstream Driver,' while John Martyn and Nick Drake ride again in the mystic folkery of 'Little Pieces.' [May 2009, p.86]
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It may be the weakest album in their catalog.
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It's a showy album with very little to show.
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New Tide continues Gomez's struggle to accurately identify its sound after the initial boon of 1998's Mercury Prize, further wedging them into a narrow void between two unbecoming styles.
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Be that as it may, it is the band's recent failure to effectively collaborate, and for these 11 tracks to properly mesh, that has fostered the mediocrity inherent in A New Tide.
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The kinder, gentler, safe-for-consumption-by-sorority-girls version is fine, but it's merely entertaining where it used to be enchanting.
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A New Tide is a respectable affair reminiscent of the Beta Band at best (Airstream Driver) and David Gray at its coffee-table worst, courtesy of vocalist Ian Ball's folksy bleat.
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Q MagazineThe likes of 'Win Park Slope' are pleasant, but also disappontingly unremarkable. [May 2009, p.112]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 15 out of 20
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Mixed: 4 out of 20
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Negative: 1 out of 20
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RayBApr 9, 2009
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MeanMrMonkeyApr 18, 2009
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sorenkApr 17, 2009