This 1998 reissue contains 9 bonus tracks not on the original release.
The Move: Roy Wood, Carl Wayne, Rick Price, Bev Bevan.
All tracks have been digitally remastered.
Personnel: Roy Wood (vocals, guitar, keyboards); Bev Bevan (vocals, drums); Rick Price , Carl Wayne (vocals).
Audio Mixer: Rob Keyloch.
The Move was always a hard band to pin down. They began by bringing a hard-edged American rock & roll sensibility to '60s British psych-pop, alternating between rave-ups and trip-outs. By the time of SHAZAM, one of the group's strongest efforts, the sound was most comparable to S.F. SORROW-era Pretty Things. There are hard-rock riffs aplenty, but they're employed in the service of long, ambitious songs, occasionally of a conceptual nature. The lengthy centerpiece, "Cherry Blossom Clinic," is indicative of SHAZAM's sound. "Clinic" tells the story of life inside a mental institution in a constantly shifting tour de force that moves from spoken-word fragments to heavy proto-progressive riffs to fanciful folk/baroque acoustic guitar tapestries.
On the other side of the coin, the band wrings some crunchingly heavy, Led Zep-like blues-rock out of some unlikely source material on the Barry Mann/Cynthia Weill composition "Don't Make My Baby Blue". Similarly, Tom Paxton's simple folk standard "The Last Thing On My Mind" is transformed into a moody, cinematic, seven-and-a-half-minute psychedelic rock epic. As if all this weren't enough, there's also nine (!) juicy bonus tracks.
Professional Reviews
Rolling Stone (5/14/70, p.52) - "...SHAZAM is a brutally energetic rock and roll album....The Move must be kept going to give us more albums like this one."
