Voom are on with Buzz Moller decked out in pink, including his beanie. We’re off in the dreamy drone Pop of this peculiar cult Kiwi band.
Melding post-Pepper psychedelia, Brian Wilson’s paranoid heaven of Smile, Big Star’s genius Power Pop eccentricity and the band have carried the mantle of Pop obsessive New Zealand band since their first album Now I Am Me in 1998.
A lot longer than one generation to get to their third album just released. Only 19 years after their second, Hello, Are You There?
Maintain the quality. Elevate the mythic.
The Stooges legendary status rests on three key albums from 1969 to 1973. Iggy Pop was rescued by David Bowie and went on to have a decent solo career. But the sheer power of that triple play remains and guys like Jack White still refer to them as touchstones.
This band has stretched their triple play to thirty years plus.
Buzz is up there with long serving compadres, Murray Fisher (Goodshirt) guitar, Sidekicknick Nick Buckton bass, Josh Sorenson drums.
I confess I only heard about them in 2021 (everyone else knew about them), when I attended a reunion show at the Hollywood Theatre in Avondale. Images from classy vampire movie Near Dark and burning napalmed jungles of Apocalypse Now framing the band.
One year ago, they played a Flying Nun triple-header with Reb Fountain and Vera Ellen. They previewed some of the songs that were finally released on Something Good Is Happening a week ago
They start with one of their favourites, Beautiful Day. The sound mix is a little muddy lacking mid-range definition and there is heavy distorted feedback. That is fixed early, but it takes a little while for the balance to come right.
The place was packed right back to the public bar area. Moller tells us the band was asked to livestream the show, but they kept it local to the people present.
Echo on the mike and half the spoken words to the crowd are lost.
Doesn’t matter. Moller is an underrated singer, and he has the same vulnerable tenor as Alex Chilton. The Box Top started as a teen with a freakishly big Righteous Brother’s baritone.
Then a pile of new songs from the album.
We Don’t Care and Trouble has a flat delivery in the manner of a Jonathan Richman when he was in his early obsessive Velvet Underground phase.
The music of Voom relates best to the quiet obsessive Folk Pop of the third VU album. The one with Pale Blue Eyes.
Something Good is Happening is a beautiful melody with a wonderful falsetto from Moller. On the album there is an unidentified female voice. Similar voice on Crazy Feeling.
Magic reminds me of the tone of Lovin’ Spoonful. Maybe the band was thinking of Do you Believe in Magic?
They do several fan favourites.
Martin Phillips is reverential of course, where we hear references to West Coast Los Angeles and the Beach Boys. A sense of loss pervades.
No Real Reality. Music is trippy and hallucinatory. Sentiment is Buddhist and relates to the universe of quantum physics.
Carries on the sentiment with We’re So Lost. There is an elegant simplicity to this music which lays its hooks in you quietly.
Out comes some heavier Rock guitar riffs. It’s a cover of Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl.
Marawannabe. Drone music but this one gets edgy and fraught with sharpened guitar blades. Approaches the Cramps playing on the Alex Chilton-produced material.
There’s a brief interlude where they do the Encore dance.
If I Waited a Long Time is the new album’s closer. Tender and melodic but with an underlying toughness from its simplicity.
Voom close the night with two more classics. I Want My Baby and B Your Boy. It may be a cliché, but their music is timeless.
Rev. Orange Peel
Photography by Den
Jim Nothing
