INXS, Switch

Now let me first say…I did NOT watch Rock Star: INXS

I won’t say the Mrs. and I are big INXS fans, but what we liked….we liked a lot.
I will further say that we were a lot more upset about Michael Hutchence offing himself than we were of Kurt Cobain. After listening to “Switch”, their latest offering, I have some observations, and I’ll get back again after discussing the album with the Mrs. to see if her take is similar.
Having an “untainted” view (having not seen the show)…after my first listening I was not so much under-whelmed as unsure. The entire album (except for “Gods Top Ten”) has a very “in the can” feel to it. New singer J.D. Fortune gets some writing credit, but I think its just publicity. Musicianship is typically tight as on previous records, but there was more of an organic feel to records with Hutchence. You could tell they tweaked the music to fit with his swaggering vocal style. I sense none of that here. The music could almost be electronic on most of the songs it seems so planned out (over-engineered is the term I would apply).
Mr. Fortune does a great job in the lower register of breathy talk/singing that Mike did so well (He’s almost better at it than Mike). Where he fails is in the high register, Hutchence always had a screaming quality to his high notes (even when not at the top of his range). Fortune probably has a wider range than Hutchence, so he doesn’t have to force out those notes, but you can’t really appreciate it on this album because he’s trying so hard to copy Hutchence, but he can’t capture that high note immediacy (or intensity) Hutchence had. As I said before, the music sounds like it’s already in the can, so Fortune sounds like he’s doing a voice over in the mix on many of the songs. The vocals are dialed back so much on a few songs (to IMO make up for his lack of emotion when singing them), that it almost seems like background vocals.
The best song on the disc is “Gods Top Ten” , which is actually a duet from (according to a google search) one of the girl contestants from Rock Star. It has the most earthy feel musically, like everyone was there all along from the start working on the song together….much like their previous music.
After hearing this song, I have to wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to pick the girl and head in a new direction, instead of ordering up a wannabe and trying a do-over on the previous INXS success formula.

I’ll have to listen a few more times to get a better feel, I hope it improves with age.