Revisiting Gomez's Liquid Skin

When it comes to letting my first impressions lead me astray, I am as guilty of it as anyone else. As a child of the cable TV and Internet age, my attention span could hardly be shorter. As a result, it takes a lot to get me to listen to new music. If I'm not drawn in within the first few seconds of a new album a friend puts on, the chances are fairly good that I will start agitating for something else to be put on before the second track is over. Even after many years of experience proving that this is a terrible attitude to have (I remained convinced without evidence that Phish sucked for about ten years, and now they're one of my very favorite bands) I'm still really reluctant to give anything a second chance. This all despite the fact that the album that might be my overall favorite of the past ten years is one I dismissed on first listen as an overproduced, songless mess.

Luckily for me, Gomez's Liquid Skin, which was released in 1999, was not the first release by the band to which I was exposed. Gomez's Mercury Prize-winning first record, Bring It On, was and is an album that completely delivers when it comes to sucking the listener in right from the first spin. It's front-loaded with the band's best songs, almost the first thing you hear is the amazing blues-based vocals of Ben Ottewell, and the songs for the most part fall in to established patterns that make sense and are easy to absorb for experienced rock fans. Bring It On was one of the best debut albums I had ever heard when I first got turned on to Gomez as a freshman in college and I anticipated followup Liquid Skin with the same kind of white-knuckle impatience you normally associate with preteen kids and Christmas Eve.