Like a certain band of freezing simians from Sheffield THE VOOM BLOOMS from Loughborough are another outfit 'discovered' by virtue of their self-promotion on My Space last year. Still less that a year old they now find themselves with a debut single on Fiction Records and a March tour as part of Club NME. Pretty fast work in anyone's book and on paper all very exciting.
Listening to 'Politics and Cigarettes' the truth is however far more prosaic. Although their closest peers in sound are probably Bloc Party (particularly on the flip side 'Thoughts of Rena' which is the better of the two tracks on offer) if I'm brutally honest they sound like a band who are trying to run before they have learned to walk; a band whose sound is still defined by rehearsal rooms and influences rather than by gigs and self discovery. Not that 'Politics and Cigarettes' is a bad song, it just lacks any 'WOW' factor and sounds more like something that has been shaped to reflect the commercial realities of what people want to hear rather than what the band want to express.
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Surfing the New Wave of New Wave this far into the season in an already overcrowded market is alright if you've something new to say and can chime out an ear-catching way of saying it but THE VOOM BLOOMS seem to be riffing solely on other people's ideas. As debut singles go this is insistently average and straight-laced, dominated by a gaping chasm where a singular vision or an unflinching musical individualism should be.
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