Those tens of thousands of tours they've endured have paid off handsomely for the Move: their music, both in performance and on this album., is both powerful and intricately structured and flowing. Shazam is a brutally energetic rock and roll album.

It opens with "Hello Susie," which, in a substantially different form, was a large hit by a popular British teenybopper act called Amen Corner a while back. The Move introduced it during their American visit with sarcastic remarks about how they'd restored it to its original state, and surely thier own version will make even the hardiest teeny wilt with horror. Devastatingly brutal and containing some absolutely lewd guitar, it's sung with unutterable viciousness by Wayne, who delivering some of the nastiest growling ever captured on vinyl, sounds like he'd just as soon bite off Susie's head as look at her.

"Beautiful Daughter," a tuneful little pop ditty embellished by a string section that sounds like it just arrived from a McCartney session, is a defintite throwback to the first Move album, where, occasional syrupy Paulie imitations are to be found.

In "Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited," an adaptation of a charming song about confinement in a mental hospital from the first album, the Move show us all their new tricks. Poundingly rocking and energetic, its orgasmic choruses are yanked in by siren-screech guitar-slides from Wood, after the last of which there appears a short acoustic bridge that introduces an amazing series of composed movements that alternately feature a barouque Spanish guitar line in front of Price's stalking sinister bass, explosive drumming, and finally a choral repetition in falsetto of the baroque guitar line. The walls of the Whisky very nearly crumbled when the Move performed this one there last October.

"Don't Make My Baby Blue" is a Mann-Weil semi-schlocker which the Move have converted into a stunning display of all the techniques that characterize the most compelling, "heavy" rock and roll. Wood here employs a monstrously ferocious Jimmy Pagish guitar tone that he makes work perfectly in the context of the song. He slices the song in half in the middle with a screechingly dissonant wah-wah explosion that will floor you, and then at the end hands it over to Bev, whose drum explosion signals the torrent of sirenish harmonies that end the song.

"The Last Thing On My Mind" clinches it: what the Move here do with Tom Paxton compares qutie favorably with anything the Byrds ever did with Dylan. And perhaps not coincidently, the Move use all the Byrds' tricks, right down to the dense-sounding twelve-string guitar and massive high choruses that will remind you of jets taking off.

Do what you can to prevent this from being the last Move album. Petition Regal Zonophone in England or A&M (who's still sitting stupidly on the first album, afraid to release it). Or write your congressman. The Move must be kept going to give us more albums like this one.

© 1970 Rolling Stone

Transcribed by Mike Kenny

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