Gomez – Whatever's On Your Mind

Perhaps best known as the second-most preposterous winners of the Mercury Music Prize for their 1998 debut Bring it On (a list that M People will surely top in perpetuity), Gomez have continued ploughing the infertile furrow scraped out on that record over the years. The inevitably ever-diminishing returns have now yielded Whatever's On Your Mind, a record which mostly feels like a run-through of everything about 90s guitar music you've probably tried to forget.

Thus, the title track reanimates the corpse of Embrace's bloated, string-laden sentimentalism; while I Will Take You There revisits Dodgy's gratingly chirpy brass-backed indie rock. At its best, Whatever sounds something like a less adventurous version of Wilco, with less memorable tunes. Jeff Tweedy and co's sound is certainly not the worst blueprint to follow, but you'd think after all this time that Gomez might be a little more adept at generating some interesting music from it.