“This is what I use to make myself more attractive to girls,” Gomez singer Tom Gray joked from the stage at New York’s Hiro Ballroom a few weeks ago, fingering a plastic melodica. It might be Gray’s only trick: dedicated since 1996 to cooking up a hippie-friendly art-blues brew, these terminally nerdy UK Bonnaroo faves could be the least sexy band in the world. But what they lack in swagger, Gray and his mates (including two other singers, babyfaced Ian Ball and bespectacled Ben Ottewell) make up for with easygoing charm. On How We Operate, their first studio disc for Dave Matthews’s ATO label, they strum guitars and shake maracas like a bunch of guys hanging out at a rooftop barbecue while waiting for somebody to return with more beer. The genre mixing that’s defined previous Gomez discs — 2002’s electro-folky In Our Gun in particular — works in a more understated way here; the songwriters seem less concerned with showing off their chops than they have in the past. Maybe Matthews shared with them his top-secret recipe for frat-dude ubiquity.

On the Web
Gomez: //www.gomez.co.uk/