 | | Switches |
For around rolls another Mancunian Summer, and a series of gigs in a venue where you can quite easily shed your own bodyweight in sweat. Yum. Of course, this could all be a cunning ploy by the management to get their entire clientele to get quite thoroughly wasted, but I’m not that cynical. However, please forgive my feeble Britishness if I precede with the disclaimer that I spent most of Switches set necking overly large bottles of beer and sweating cobs. Right. That over, lets get onto the music. It is rather heartening to see stompy glam rock making a comeback, and whilst Switches are never going to set the music scene on fire, they do manage to do what they do rather well; resplendent with a lead singer choc full of bombast who chicken struts his way around the small stage like a Tesco Extra Value Freddy Mercury. They’ve got a good set of tunes under their belt and you can certainly dance to them, a fact ably demonstrated by the numerous clumps of worryingly young looking girls at the front from singing along to all the words. However, for all their pseudo rock god charms, you can’t help but get the feeling it’s all been done to death before. Skinny young men wrapping themselves in neck scarves and David Bowie t-shirts are ten-a-penny nowadays, and unless you actively go around seeking them out, none of the tunes demonstrated tonight really manage to stick in your head and your heart. You certainly can’t fault the boys for trying admirably, but it’s going to take a lot more than a Queen revival to turn me on to Switches. | 
