**1/2 Gomez

LIQUID SKIN

(Virgin)

With their debut CD, Bring It On, Gomez, a quintet of young English upstarts, surprised a lot of pop observers by snatching 1998's Mercury Music Prize (the UK's Grammy) from some tough competition. The award catapulted the then-inexperienced group, its members still in their early 20s, into a world tour that could've heaped too much pressure on one of the year's more promising acts.

Liquid Skin, though, proves Gomez have held it together. The album expands on the unsettling grace and eerie maturity of its predecessor with vivid portraits ("Blue Moon Rising"), wide-eyed rock balladry ("We Haven't Turned Around"), and the group's ongoing fascination with American culture and geography ("California," "Las Vegas Dealer"). If Bring It On established Gomez's earnest devotion to a broad garage-rock tradition, from Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Grateful Dead to Pearl Jam (whose Eddie Vedder Gomez's Ben Ottewell possesses an uncanny vocal similarity to), Liquid Skin stretches out and lets the band make more of their own mark. That means further developing an idiosyncratic and organic approach, one that reaches ambitious, White Album-like musical heights on "California" and "Bring It On." Gomez revel in the proverbial long, strange trip of it all, and it does seem to be taking them somewhere.

-- Mark Woodlief