Years in the making: Voom make a long-awaited return to the music industry

Voom: Showing plenty of drive. Photo / Frances Carter

Something Good is Happening

By Voom

Buzz Moller and his intermittent project Voom – debut album Now I Am Me in 1998, the follow-up Hello, Are You There? eight years later and given a vinyl pressing in 2021 – have enjoyed great affection for their heartfelt, sometimes raw and always melodic guitar pop which roams freely between ragged rock and slacker anthems (Happy Just Bumming Around on Hello and the power-pop adjacent We Don’t Care here).

An understated writer with a firm grasp of what makes optimistic pop work, Moller opens this long-awaited album with the brief but lovely, Four Freshmen-like vocal harmony piece Unless You Are Alive (“you are never going to know how it feels”), offers chugging unburnished pop (Trouble, the gloriously memorable Crazy Feeling) and crafts miniatures like the two-minute title track (which says it all in just those words), the 90-second McCartneyesque The Most Beautiful Girl and delightful pop of Everyone (with a touch of early Dylan).

Only the distorted spook circus of Nightmare Man and lo-fi Pianos and Mushrooms instrumental break the prevailing mood: One More Chance opens with “I couldn’t live without you,” a typical sentiment here. Someone hasn’t had enough of silly love songs.

Something Good is Happening is a winning, refreshing tonic of positive, local pop destined for many best-of-the-year lists.

Voom’s Something Good Is Happening tour: Double Whammy, Auckland, May 23; The Yard, Raglan, May 24; The Loons, Lyttelton, May 30; San Fran, Wellington, May 31.