Review: Voom - Something Good Is Happening
On the stunning new record from Auckland band Voom, same day trips to the big city, and the legacy of radio station Channel Z
I grew up in Whangārei through my teens and twenties and, for most of that period, at least musically, I felt like I was living in the dark ages.
Live bands didn’t tour to Whangārei. They mostly still don’t; most touring bands go as far north as the Mangawhai Tavern and, if they went further, it was the Duke Of Marlborough Tavern in Russell.
Radio was also relentlessly bland. We had one local pop station called KCC FM - Kauri Coast to Coast - whose unintentionally hilarious channel sting was a trio of voices singing “K, K, K double C FM” … you know, like the racist group. We also had ZM, but, yuck. Even The Rock hadn’t yet arrived in the area.
It meant that Auckland - the big city - was a regular destination if you wanted to see a live band, and the only destination if you wanted to see international bands. Between 1995 and 2010, I drove to Auckland and back in the same day to see Live and Sugar Ray in 2000, Tool in 2001, Muse in 2004, The Shins in 2007, Linkin Park in 2007, Interpol in 2008, Foo Fighters in 2008, Pearl Jam in 2009 and 13 straight Big Day Outs starting in 1997.
Also, if you’re driving back late, it meant a mandatory stop at Denny’s at Wairau Park. We didn’t have a Denny’s in Whangārei. We also didn’t have a Wendy’s; a friend of a friend loved Wendy’s so much that she would drive from Whangārei to the North Shore just to get Wendy’s for dinner. In her shitty twenty year old Honda. $10 plus a tank of gas is too much to pay for a Baconator.
The other thing I made sure we did when we were in Auckland during that period: switch to Channel Z. Whangārei didn’t have anything like Channel Z, this radio station playing the music I liked, and offering up other songs that I might be interested in and, honestly, usually I was.
So when Channel Z announced the were releasing a double-album of highlights from their playlists in the year 2000, it was an event. Channel Z: The Best Of Vol 1 was 36 tracks of cool (at the time) music that we never heard on our zeitgeist-phobic local radio offerings. I’m talking Papa Roach’s “Last Resort” and 28 Days’ “Sucker” and Kid Rock’s “American Badass” and Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy”, and luminaries like Stellar*, Filter, Sevendust, Moby, P.O.D. and so much more.
Channel Z: The Best Of Vol. 2 landed in 2002 and was another instant purchase, another 33 tracks of classic millennial culture including Sugar Ray’s “When It’s Over”, Linkin Park’s “Papercut”, The Feelers’ “Astronaut”, Puddle Of Mudd’s “Control”, Drowning Pool, Blindspott, Bush, P.O.D. again, and much more.
I’m being purposefully glib here.
While I can’t stand by all of the artists included, the Channel Z albums introduced me to groups I loved for a time: Deftones, Incubus, the Dandy Warhols, and Ben Harper, and local acts like Goodshirt, Fur Patrol, and Weta - even acts who have come and gone, like Slim and Sommerset and Wash and Tadpole.
It changed my opinion of Kiwi music, hearing it mixed in alongside these other bands I loved. It helped me realise Kiwi music was world class.
I mention all of this because the 14th song on Disc 1 of Channel Z: The Best Of Vol 2 was one of my absolute favourites on either compilation. A song I’d never heard called “King Kong” from a band I’d never heard of called Voom.
I tried to find out more about Voom. My local record stores didn’t have stock of their only album to that point, 1998’s Now I Am Me (and even if they did, “King Kong” was on 2006’s Hello, Are You There?), and they didn’t have any singles from Voom, which at least might have featured a b-side.
Eventually I gave up searching and stuck to thrashing the one track I had on the Channel Z album. I wasn’t paying attention when their second album dropped. And at some point, I stopped listening to “King Kong” too. I didn’t think about Voom again until this year when new songs started to land on streaming.
Fortunately, Voom singer and creative force Buzz Moller was still thinking about Voom, putting down demos and filing them away in case he wanted to come back to them and do something new with the band.
Chris Schultz interviewed Buzz Moller last week for his newsletter Boiler Room and it was a fascinating read. For me, the most interesting part of the interview was when Moller shared some of his songwriting process:
Something Good is Happening is a scrapbook of his last 25 years, a greatest hits record from an artist who refuses to reveal most of his work to the world. Some of these songs are rough sketches found incidentally on ageing hard drives or cassette tapes. Others are snippets from Moller’s hour-long jams, or culled from lengthy improvised sessions with his band. A fair few were surprise finds after booting up his Apple Mac from 2004 and liking what he heard.
Putting them together takes time because Moller has so much material to trawl through. “You can’t give people a big sticky sack of honey. You have to put it in nice little jars,” he says. “You have to make a consumer-friendly package of emotions.” To do that, he needs to feel detached from the music he’s made. That can take, well, decades. “It’s quite handy to not remember that you’ve written a song,” Moller says. “When you find it, you don’t recognise it. You see yourself as other people see you. You hear it afresh. Your ego isn’t attached to it.”
Something Good Is Happening is, in a word, brilliant. And I think a big part of that comes down to the sheer amount of time taken to write these songs, and the detachment Moller described to Schultz. Working without a deadline invites creativity into the process; its the reason that so many artists’ first album is also their best album - they’ve been working on the songs for years, refining them, adding instruments, slightly adjusting the tempo or adding a subtle string section or a vocal harmony. You don’t get there the same way if you have to get it done by Friday at the behest of some A&R rep trying to save on studio time.
If Moller was rushing through these songs, we probably don’t get the layered vocals during the bridge of “Crazy Feeling”, or the short mandolin part around the 2:15 mark of “I Love You Girl” off the back of the piano solo, or any of a hundred moments on this record which are small and subtle and make all the difference when you listen to the album.
Probably my favourite tracks here are the middle album 1-2 punch of obstinate rocker “We Don’t Care” (‘we don’t care any more about you / go do what you think you’ve gotta do’ Moller sings ahead of the first chorus) and the stunning duet with Fazerdaze on “Magic”, the guitar and drums driving along behind them.
Moller shows off some range here too. “Do You Still Believe Me” finds him turning wistful over a relatively simple acoustic guitar, while interlude “Most Beautiful Girl” sounds like a love song until you hear him sing ‘the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world / and every time that I look at her, I wanna kill her’, over a guitar tone that sounds like it came straight from The Animals recording session for “House Of The Rising Sun” in 1964. Somehow, its perfect.
By the time closer “If I Waited A Lifetime” finishes - clocking in at just 1:14 and playing like a last minute thought at the end of a conversation - you’ll be ready to flip this one back over and start it again. We’ve had some great local albums this year already. Something Good Is Happening eclipses them all.
Seriously, check out the new Voom album on streaming.
Have a great long weekend - I’ll see you next week.
Chris xo
Absolutely insane way to make an album right? Somehow it just works…