The Shazam
Tomorrow The World (Not Lame)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Summer 2004

With a band name taken from a Move album and an album title nicked from a Ramones song, the Shazam don’t promise hell of a lot of originality, and Tomorrow The World sounds like your music nerd friend digging through his record crates. Derivativeness isn’t without its charms, though, especially in a tradition-oriented genre like power pop, and it’s hard to complain too much about a vinyl collection that includes Todd Rundgren (“Squeeze The Day”), Imperial Drag (“We Think Yer Dead”) and the New York Dolls, whose “Personality Crisis” is done one better by the opening of “Nine Times” and whose version of “(There’s Gonna Be A) Showdown” seems to have been the blueprint of the anthemic “Gettin’ Higher.” Otherwise, the Shazam’s most original moves are using “Don’t Lie To Me” instead of the more common “Feel” as the basis for their Big Star rip (the shuffling, swaggering “Goodbye American Man”) and selecting, I think, a fictional band as a touchstone for “Not Lost Anymore,” which is what “All My Only Dreams” might have sounded like had the Wonders survived long enough to embark upon a quasi-psychedelic phase. I also hear bits of “Paperback Writer” and “Gimme Shelter” throughout, and I wouldn’t notice, and it wouldn’t matter, if the songs were more than scaffolding for the monuments the Shazam are building to their heroes. All told, Tomorrow The World gives us what we never really asked for but probably couldn’t hurt anyway: another Sloan.

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