Album Review

Switches – Heart Turned to D.E.A.D

• 8th May 2007

The Darkness meets The Fratellis in this latest indie-carnation from Switches. It’s like the sound track to an aspirational high school flick from the eighties in which someone like Ferris Bueller is seen smooching three badly haired women whilst performing under-age drinking and trying to look wild in a ridiculously tame party scene where no one is even smoking.

This album is obviously supposed to be a musical ‘tour de force’, a swashbuckling assault on the senses. They have chucked everything in there, including the kitchen sink, but it all feels a bit too much. There’s a lot of music, singing, harmonising and driving guitars but not enough quality, not enough actual harmony in the sound.

I am all about songs over style. If it’s a good song a band can do what they like with it. The golden rule is of course, to make the good song first and then start dressing and producing it. But there is no originality here or, indeed, any obvious song writing talent. Every track is like a medley of 10 bad XFM songs from the past. With a dozen songs on the album that’s over one hundred bad XFM songs. You have been warned.

Switches are proficient, they can sing and play but they seem to think that a song will always be good providing they throw enough music into it. I beg to differ. They want to be Queen but they are much closer to Scissor Sisters. On this point, CAN EVERYONE PLEASE STOP SOUNDING LIKE THE SCISSOR SISTERS ALREADY!!! It’s not clever and it’s certainly not hard.