Yahoo! Music Review

Released on 23/04/07
Label: Atlantic

For all their indie pop hooks - and were this to appear on the stereo at a summer barbecue and there was an orange sun on the horizon and a cold beer in your hand, there's no question you'd find yourself mindlessly bobbing your head along while discussing holiday plans with someone in IT - there is something wrong, wrong, wrong with this debut album from Southend four-piece Switches.

Producer Rob Schnapf - a regular on the mixing desk for Elliott Smith and occasionally Beck - must take some of the blame for "Heart Tuned To D.E.A.D."'s disappointing nature. Evidently being paid by the hour, he's put in plenty of knob hours: no opportunity for a tambourine shake, or an organ lick, or a guitar solo, or a bout of glammy ooh-oohs has been missed. One thing he hasn't given it is any distinguishing features. The superbly-titled "Step Kids In Love" should have been a Morrissey-meets-Goldfrapp bedroom stomper. It isn't.

The album is not just derivative (more on that later), it's too polite by far. Every time singer Matt Bishop refers to drugs, or says what he probably in private calls 'the f-word', you can almost hear his eyeballs swivelling to the side to check mum's not in the room. When he sings about a girl's "ass" you picture a strait-laced girlfriend just out of view giving him what-for on the drive home. "You're cool, I'm hot!, You're girl, I'm not!" ("Message To Yuz") would make you laugh even if Josh Homme sang it while holding a gun to your head.

It's even worse when he does sensitive: the falsetto on obligatory 'hot girl gone to the bad side' drip-fest "The Need To Be Needed" is absolutely ghastly from every conceivable angle. His most comfortable-sounding performance by far is The Feeling-esque lovey-dovey soft rocker "Coming Down" - funnily enough, though, the M&S-wearing chart-botherers are about the only male Brit band not paid extensive homage to here. Which brings us back to the derivative thing.

Is it so terrible? "Drama Queen"'s resemblance to peak-period Supergrass and Blur doesn't make it a dreary listen; the myriad musical allusions to "Yoshimi…"-era Flaming Lips (especially "Give Up The Ghost" and "Killer Karma") aren't unpleasant. More recent influences come to bear as well - Franz Ferdinand (current single "Lay Down The Law" is the missing link between "Take Me Out" and "The Dark Of the Matinee"), Arctic Monkeys and The Darkness. It's just that, taken as a whole, a work this devoid of original note, beat and word tends to come across as so much leftover cold curry.

    by Anna Britten