Gomez's first London date after a break of two years was never going to be an event to send people home as high as kites. A band who react to the words "hair and make-up" the way Superman does to "Kryptonite", they espouse the old-fashioned view that merely turning up is enough. If fans want a show, they can jolly well go and see Kylie Minogue.
Their ability to spend decades jamming on stage, an irritating practice that violates an audience's right not to feel like gatecrashers at the dullest student party in town, made them notorious from the start. But four years after their album Bring It On won the Mercury music prize, Gomez have taken the criticism to heart - a bit.
They still look like roadies, plodding on in a range of creased T-shirts and bird's-nest thatches. They still climb behind their guitars with the youthful exuberance of septuagenarian professors. They still tackle material, primarily from the brand-new album In Our Gun, as if they are archaeologists exhuming a rare clay jug. But the jamming has been eliminated, putting something like a spring in their step.
The lack of noodling time obliges them to economise on every note, and while this evidently rankles with guitarists Ben Ottewell and Ian Ball, at least it's no longer a case of never-mind-the- quality-feel-the-length. In a show crammed with 11 new songs, it makes the difference between keeping the crowd's attention and driving them to the bar. The rootsy textures are lusher, and Ottewell, the one with the Chris Rea wheeze, digs that much deeper for his vocal shadings ("That's a fooker to sing," he gasps after shredding his throat on a blues tune).
The brevity also lets us speedily take the measure of the In Our Gun songs, and conclude that while Gomez's organic sound has been tarted up with a few samples and loops, imparting a lovely Middle Eastern perfume to Rex Kramer, essentially they are still the Traveling Wilburys with Southport accents. Saying that, the populist Wilburys would have been less miserly about playing familiar stuff. It seems all Gomez can do to haul out perfunctory versions of Love Is Like a Trombone and 78 Stone Wobble. The muso aesthetic isn't dead - it has just changed its clothes.
