Foxy Shazam Bring the Brutal Truth to New York

“Roses are red, violets are blue. Foxy Shazam, baby. Fuck you!” – Eric Nally, Foxy Shazam

Eric Nally, charismatic frontman of Cincinnati rock outfit Foxy Shazam, has always had a way with words. “The best advice I can give you is if you ever feel lost, the best way to not be lost is to very simply change where you were going.” This is what Nally expresses very carefully to the crowd at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, NY before diving onto the floor as his band launches into “Holy Touch” from 2012’s Church of Rock and Roll.

Certainly, Nally speaks from the heart. Their latest Steve Albini-produced release, GONZO, sees Foxy Shazam as a band that is changing the way they’re going in order to find themselves again. They dug deep, shaved their facial hair, traded bedazzled jackets for purple turtlenecks, and found primal art within their theatrical persona.

Touring in support of their latest release, Foxy Shazam has turned their show into a two part act. The first half showcases GONZO in full, and as much as they reached deep down inside of themselves on record, they dig just as deep on stage. Draped in purple, Foxy charge forcefully through GONZO with newfound focus and grace. There’s a raw power to these songs that comes to fruition in a live setting. “Brutal Truth,” “Shoe Box,” and set closer “Story Told” are quite poignant and sound better than they do on record.

After a short intermission, Foxy Shazam reemerges as the band we knew before: shirtless, sweaty, and hungry for another rowdy audience. The colors on stage are brighter, and Nally is more talkative again. The band kicks off the second set with a raucous rendition of “Bombs Away,” off their self-titled release. As they plow through favorites like “Oh Lord,” “Yes Yes Yes,” and “I Like It,” the band sounds as tight as ever, and Nally’s voice remains strong. The highlight of the night goes to “The Only Way to My Heart,” one of Foxy’s best songs in their arsenal. During the song’s crescendo, Nally, pianist “Sky” White, and trumpeter/back-up vocalist Alex Nauth wretch, stomp, and sway like skeletons in high wind. As a strobe light flashes in back, it all becomes a very surreal experience, which is on par with a typical Foxy Shazam show.

Foxy ended their show with the glam-anthem “Unstoppable.” As they left the stage, the raucous crowd was loudly pleading for more, but to no avail. The band never reemerged for what would’ve been a natural way to perform an encore. But that’s okay… always leave them wanting more, right? Foxy Shazam has always been known for their wild live shows, but up until now, they’ve been taken for granted. We came to expect the cigarette eating, rambling jokes, and microphone flip tricks, and they delivered like puppets on a string. Coming into this tour after releasing a demon-cleansing album, nobody was sure what to expect. We hoped, but didn’t expect. How could we? Thankfully, after their utterly fantastic Bowery performance, it’s very clear Foxy Shazam is a confident band that is no longer lost; they’re finally in control of where they’re going.

Foxy Shazam Goes Gonzo

by Jeff Yerger

Foxy Shazam is about as unpredictable as they come. I lost sight of this for a while there. I was assuming their new album, GONZO, would follow the path of theatrical glam pop-rock its predecessors exceeded in. I was hoping this album would be their biggest and catchiest yet, but Foxy Shazam is anything but predictable.

I can honestly say that I never saw GONZO coming, because really, I never would’ve thought this band had it in them. This is a statement record, one few bands dare to make. They followed up a heavily produced glam rock record produced by Justin Hawkins of The Darkness (The Church of Rock and Roll) with a raw piece of angry indie rock produced by the master of angry indie rock, Steve Albini (Nirvana, Pixies, PJ Harvey). On GONZO, Foxy Shazam have ditched their theatrics for minimalism, and are quite literally having their In Utero moment.

Recorded all in one day on Halloween this past year, GONZO is about as authentic and stripped as they come. “[The album] was written in a room, recorded in a room, all together,” singer Eric Nally states in the album’s press release. “It was a shared experience, and an easier process, and things really started to come out. It was a very organic experience, and it shows. And I can read [GONZO] like a book, like a cohesive piece of art. It’s by far the most personal album to me.”

GONZO is in fact a very dark record. It follows a loose story line about a man (or Muppet?) struggling with fame and being away from his family (something which Nally has been no stranger to singing about in the past). For a band known in the past for not taking themselves too seriously, lines like “A picture of me with a smile that I’m not faking / I wish things were the way they are when the picture was taken” in the excellent “Shoebox,” hit pretty hard. Nally sounds hurt, tired, and frustrated (“I got no cash flow man I’m working… It’s a tragic thrill. I’m finding out who I was, who I really am”). His voice is shredded and strained to the limit, like a man on his last leg, especially as he wails, “I’m not afraid to die ‘cause I’m already dead,” on “Have the Fun.” While teenage angst may have paid off well for Kurt Cobain, Eric Nally just feels bored and old.

A friend of mine pointed out that GONZO kinda sounds like an unfinished demo. While it’s slightly more professional than that, he does have a point. Even for an Albini production, GONZO sounds REALLY sparse. As is typical with Albini, each instrument is mic’d far away and indirectly, making the room itself an instrument. You can hear the sound from each instrument reverberate off every corner and crevice, and because of the polished Foxy records we’ve come to know and love in the past, this album sounds extra bare. There are no overdubbed vocals and no double-tracked or layered guitars. Everything is exposed.

Bassist Daisy Caplan said in a recent Reddit AMA that all the songs on GONZO were recorded in consecutive order with everyone in one room, and with the same set up for each song. “There are less than five overdubs on the whole record, no overdubbed vocal harmonies, and about 1/3 of the songs are actually first takes,” writes Caplan. He also mentioned that the vocals, which usually require a separate booth for recording to reduce sound bleeding, were recorded live in the room with the guitar amps and drums. “Even Steve Albini thought we were crazy.” The result is a jarring change in sound for Foxy, but the energy and spontaneity of this record is undeniable and at times, downright beautiful. For instance, there’s a moment on “In This Life” after the second chorus where the guitar and piano build upon this riff they’ve been hinting at the whole song into an understated crescendo. It’s typical Foxy grandioso, but in a different way.

GONZO is going to piss a lot of Foxy Shazam fans off. That’s just a fact of life with a record like this, but I think at the same time, this record is going to earn them tons of respect. I don’t think GONZO their best record (that would be their last one), but I do think this is their most cohesive and honest effort to date. This is a scathing record; a therapeutic primal scream from a band that could no longer laugh away the hurt. I think this is something that they needed to get off their chest, and the fact that they recorded this all in one day shows that they wanted to get these demons out and not dwell on any of it. As I mentioned before, not a lot of bands have the balls to do something like this, so you have to give credit where credit is due. With GONZO, Foxy Shazam have taken a big step in their journey. Which direction this step is in I haven’t a clue, but I’m not even going to try to predict.

Stream and download the album for FREE at foxyshazam.com.