Switch

All right, so they’ve got a dodgy moniker, they’re very young and very easy on the eyes, and their manager is the dad of one of them. Nevertheless, Switch are no Svengali-engineered pop moppets. They write their own songs – bloody good ones, given their youth and relative inexperience. And they do play their own instruments… most of the time.

If there was one frustrating thing about the group’s recent Whelan’s gig, held in honour of the launch of their debut album In’shallah, it was the omnipresent wash of glossy production that dominated the night. Three crack session musicians on guitar, bass and drums thrummed away behind them, while ghostly disembodied piano solos issued mysteriously from somewhere in the mix, bearing no relation to anything keyboard player Joanne Coughlan appeared to be doing with her hands.

Nevertheless, the three girls – Coughlan, singer/guitarist Catherine Foley and singer Denise Goggin, who can also play a mean concertina when she chooses – put on an impressive show. Goggin, warm-voiced and confident, opened the proceedings with an aching teenage angst number called ‘Cry’, then handed lead vocal duties over to Foley for the more countryish ‘Leap Of Faith’. Things really got going three songs in, when Goggin took the lead on a shimmering, upbeat ditty called ‘Close My Eyes’ – composed by Coughlan, who takes something of a backseat role onstage but turns out to have written much of the group’s stronger material, including the radio-friendly singles ‘So Far Up’ and ‘Hush’.

It’s clear that Switch have a strong belief in what they’re doing, and they’ve got more than enough vocal and songwriting talent to justify their existence. If they can hold true to their own musical instincts and resist the urge to cater for the requirements of some imagined market, they should do well.