Foxy Shazam
Burn EEE OOO AH
Swashbuckling neo-glam eccentrics return from seven-year sabbatical.
A decade ago, Cincinnati glam-punk dandies Foxy Shazam seemed poised for greatness, their high-camp theatricality and incendiary live shows earning rave reviews and majorl-abel deals. Their dynamic, androgynous, preposterously coiffed frontman Eric Sean Nally always had live-wire charisma to burn, even if his fissile talents never quite translated into commercial traction during Foxy’s erratic first decade.
After an ill-advised, undercooked excursion into lo-fi garage-rock minimalism on their 2014 album Gonzo, the band went on open-ended hiatus. Nally later had a hit-single collaboration with Seattle pop-rapper Macklemore, and the Foxy music fell silent, apparently forever. Yet here they are again, rebooted and reconfigured for a second shot at the big prizes that eluded them last time.
Channelling Mick Jagger, James Brown and Freddie Mercury via Justin Hawkins and Noel Fielding, Nally’s forte remains high-octane showmanship. But for much of he seems to play it uncharacteristically safe, clothing fairly straight pop-rock numbers in cosmetic freak-show drag. Swashbuckling saloon-bar bacchanals like and . are pretty decent retro-pastiche affairs that fall somewhere between Springsteen and Meat Loaf, while, the strongest of the album’s taster singles, is a sumptuous power ballad that swells from dainty piano twinkle to multitracked operatic bombast–imagine Sparks covering . Also pleasingly overstuffed with melodrama is galloping glam-slam anthem itself.
