SWITCH

After the hugely successful Moontan and international stardom, GE chose to change its winning formula by adding ex-Supersister keyboardist Robert-Jan Stips and tagging along some hornmen (unneeded imho, because Hay was doing fine on his own) and rhythm guitarist Eelco Gelling and attacked their next album. Anf the first thing one notices is that GE hasn't this many short songs in a while with the longest just over 6-mins. Now the equation shorter songs and more musicians than usual, usually adds up to noisier and more commercial tracks, but this doesn't mean that the commercial side is successful. And this is where our Dutch combo loses heavily as Switch is by far their worst album since becoming a heavy rock group and this is reinforced by some ugly puppet/robot as artwork.

Oh the intro of the opening Plus Minus Absurdio augurs things pretty well, but once the main riff kicks in, it's a letdown, but a small one as the playing is brilliant and the track is almost instrumental. Rodeo is an uninventive hard rocker, although the group will re-use the slowed-down riff in Mad Love Is Coming with much more success, while the title track has some subtle reggae roots/influence, but it's overstaying its welcome by 2 minutes, even if it's a rare window for musical interplay. The album- longest Kill Me, using some bad French lines (cheap marketing ploy to break France open?) is having trouble keeping interest, despite solid string arrangements (obviously arranged by Stips). The flipside is not presenting things on a brighter side. Tons of Time has again some reggae roots as the following tracks such as the sax-inclined Daddy, predictable Lonesome DJ and the riffy Troubles are best described as fillers. The worst part of it is that GE sounds like they don't even believe in themselves and the usually immediate and urgency are completely absent on this album.

Of all 70's GE album, Switch is best avoided or you might want to wait until you buy the latter 70's album, when the songs are heavily formatted as they are here. Switch must be seen as the first album of the extended line-up GE formation that will last until Contraband, and it's easily the weakest of the three, as well as paling real bad in comparison to Moontan, WOD, ST and 8MH.