omething went terribly wrong. If you’re Gomez and it is 1998, you find yourself with a Best Album Mercury Prize for Bring It On, a gorgeous show of folky Brit-blues with warbly three-part harmonies, rousing sing-alongs, and the occasional dub flourish. It's oft-maligned in retrospect, but a genuinely sparkling album. Having presumably filled their Mercury statues with weed, the boys subsequently shat out a sloppily keen B-Sides album (Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline) and a sophomore LP (Liquid Skin) that was probably unjustly jinx-bombed by critics, but not nearly as good as it should have been. But now it’s 2002: the PMS-y British press has turned bitter, and Gomez find themselves with a Dashboard Confessional-esque albatross around their stoned shoulders, by a championed sweatshirt-wearing home fan base and despised by the college Massive Attack-elitists who throw Cloves at them. And with In Our Gun, their third proper album, their best bet might be to try and get the albatross high.


“Sound of Sounds” alone is enough to make you cry. And not in that good, sentimental Lifetime Network way, but in that what-the-shit?-did-my-father-write-this sort of way. With a backbone as sturdy as dryer sheet, “SOS” (help!) sputters along a lifeless acoustic guitar with lyrics (“Have you forgotten who you are?/could you ever stop and wonder/could you live without her?”) seemingly lifted from the margins of Dave Matthews’ Psychology notebook. It’s enough to make those once incomprehensible DMB comparisons hold water.


But the middling adult contemporary slop, although awful, isn’t what ultimately drowns In Our Gun. That blame can fall squarely in the lap of misguided attempts at moody electronica, something the band has more successfully dabbled in previously. But where earlier songs devolved into rough, bouncy beats and bloops, the songs on In Our Gun opt instead for glossiness and cheese, bypassing listenabilty for camp. It’s as if simple arrangements were recorded right before the band vomited Fruity Loops on the results. When it works, as on the pulsing “Ping One Down”, it’s clean Brit-funk at its finest. When it feels like it’s lifted from a 1989 George Michael wet dream, like on “Army Dub” or the it’s-so-close-to-being-good-it’s-beyond-frustrating “Ruff Stuff,” it begs legal action.


In fact, “Army Dub” encapsulates much of the album. In Our Gun has its share of gems, because when their hearts are in the right place, Gomez has definite talent. But the joy of the stunted “Shot Shot” and the drug-induced shuffle of “Detroit Swing 66” are lost on the boring “1000 Times” and “Miles End,” songs that even Ben Ottowell’s honey-soaked gravel voice can’t revive.


It’s unfocused. It’s self-indulgent. It’s an experiment that didn’t work. It’s a step in the wrong direction. It’s every other critical cliché that suggests disappointment but not utter despair. But keep your sweatshirt--they’ll pack a bowl and do something better.