Three Lead Singers of Gomez Show Band’s Powerful Range

The highly regarded sextet Gomez is yet another in a long line of British bands that have assimilated all kinds of American and English music and arrived at a hybrid that’s pitched somewhere between both cultural poles.

But unlike such slavish pop archivists as Oasis and the Verve, Gomez is onto something completely different--a powerful blues-rock vernacular that draws from urban myth and rock cliche, psychedelic fuzztone and acoustic thrum.

The band treated each song from its debut album, “Bring It On,” as a dramatic set-piece for its performance at the Whisky on Monday. With three lead vocalists, Gomez has remarkable range, and that gave the group leeway to explore the music’s peaks and valleys.

The band has learned its lessons well from such L.A. rock standard-bearers as the Doors and Love. At the Whisky, it alternated between the spooky grandeur of “Get Miles” to such funky-baroque pop songs as “Love Is Better Than a Warm Trombone,” occasionally dancing around the song structures with open-ended jamming.

For the sweeter, more plaintive passages, guitarists Ian Ball and Tom Gray supplied the appropriate vocals, and when the band wanted to throw in true grit, it turned to Ben Ottewell, who has one of the most distinctive voices in rock at the moment. Roaring and groaning like a grizzled Delta sage, Ottewell provided Gomez with its soulful trump card.