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INXSSwitch Epic/SonyBMG Wow: it's an INXS record. No really: you could listen to pretty much any track here and immediately recognise the band, even with new frontman JD Fortune instead of the late Michael Hutchence. Now, when I say that 'Switch' is an INXS record, there are some qualifications. I don't mean it's 'The Swing' or 'Listen Like Thieves': I mean it's a worthy successor to late period records like 'Welcome To Wherever You Are'. In other words, a fair whack of it is bland-bordering-on-awful - and in the case of Hot Girls, so irredeemably dreadful that it defies conventional description (Andrew Farris has made the claim that 60 songs were considered for the album, so I shudder to think what the 49 that weren't up to Hot Girls' standard were like). At the risk of damning Fortune with faint praise, I'll also mention that it's a good thing he's fronting INXS: otherwise he'd be universally referred to as That Guy That's Trying To Sound Like Michael Hutchence. However, when the songs work - Devil's Party, Pretty Vegas, Remember Who's Your Man - it sounds downright eerie. Fortune might sing with a dead man's voice but he damn well nails it, right down to Hutchence's lower register drops and slurs. Throw in a Kirk Pengilly sax solo and some white-boy funk rhythm from Jon Farris and Gary Beers (who's mysteriously dropped the Garry) and it's undeniably INXS, with all of the positives and negatives that implies. I thought that 'Rock Star' was embarrassing and gauche, and who knows where the band will go from here, but 'Switch' is a whole lot stronger an album than it had any right to be.  |
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