ALBUM: Moving Waves (1971)
This was an album I purchased on the virtue of one song: Hocus Pocus, a much peculiar song that actually charted high in the early 1970s.
The six-minute ‘album’ version will be sure to get you a speeding ticket if driving, as the crunchy riffs bang out a head bobbing heavy metal hook. Kind of like ‘Radar Love’ only harder.
And weirder. Almost weird enough to call it a novelty song.
Why? Because sprinkled in between the wall of metal come pit stops in which the instruments quiet down (except drums) and somebody yodels, I mean full out yodeling like Dutch mountain music, if there was such a thing. That yodeling rondo-ing back and forth with the guitar riff happens a couple of pit stops. Then at the next (third?) pit stop there’s a Jethro Tull-like flute solo followed by scat singing, and finally what I can only describe as helium-laced nonsense vocals and blazing guitars. There you go.
If you don’t think you know this song, give it a listen, you might have heard it. Since buying it in a bargain bin for the song, I almost never much listened to the entire album.
There is a shorter version radio single of Hocus Pocus, which besides being shorter, opens with a funky riff, turns into the guitar solo and then it’s yodel time again.)(
The rest of the album is sometimes good in a progressive rock sort of way (such as the obligatory 20-minute album side length song.) Kind of like ELP or Genesis. Not my particular cup of tea. But Hocus Pocus is pretty cool on a listen many years later. That songs takes the ELP and puts a little Grand Funk Railroad and Beat Farmers silliness into it. (The Farmers’ semi-famously had a song, ‘Happy Boy,’ featuring gargling, kazoos and ‘hubba hubba hubba’ in it.
Some critics liked it, others didn’t.
Benjamin Ray at Daily Vault Reviews gave it a C- and said: You know how sometimes you hear a hit song and then pick up the album, hoping the rest of it is just as good? This is not one of the times where that happened.
Meanwhile, AllMusic gave ‘The Best of Focus’ four-and-a-half stars and said it could have used a little more “Moving Ways.”
Go figure, one person’s ‘more cowbell’ is another’s ‘less cowbell.’