Godspeed The Shazam

With so many of their Power Pop contemporaries in spiritual hock to the Fab Four it makes a refreshing change to find Nashville trio The Shazam owing more to the underrated escapades of that Frantic Five, The Move. Apart from adapting their name from that band's 1970 album, The Shazam also share Roy Wood's love of arrangements where Surf-tinged fripperies happily coexist with bursts of brute force. But enough of the Brummie backstory, let's move to the present.

Produced by the Power Pop underground's helmsman of choice Brad Jones, Godspeed The Shazam sees Hans Rotenberry piling on the 60s references but never at any point sounding like a catalogue-crazed kleptomaniac. Quite how American bands can base themselves on music created over three decades ago yet still sound defiantly contemporary is one of the great conundrums of recent years yet The Shazam are another outfit to manage it with nary a bother, this album being infused with a sparkling spirit and no small amount of cunning craftsmanship.

The opening 'Super Tuesday' builds from an acoustic, downbeat opening verse ("Well tomorrow's Super Tuesday and the people on the news say that yer sagging in the polls") to a Who-like surge. From that point on the album maintains the standard set. 'Sunshine Tonight' borrows its verse structure from ELO's 'Mr.Blue Sky' before heading into a dizzying chorus with the rallying cry "Put on yer Malibu sunglasses/Everybody's falling on their asses/Come along cuz it's a gas,gas,gas/It's 20 Megatons of fun sunshine tonight", 'The Stranded Stars' is more reflective but still ravishingly melodic and 'Sparkleroom' extols the virtues of female surfers, no mean feat if you're a band from Nashville.

The Shazam's debt to The Move is most obvious on 'Chipper Cherry Daylily' and the almost parodically heavy 'City Smasher' but overall Godspeed is little short of a (Captain) Marvel.