Kath Bloom
(Chapter Music)
Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise" can lay claim as the most romantic movie of the 1990s, and maybe its best scene starts in a Vienna record store where Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are listening to a mysteriously beautiful song. You can feel the power of the music - a heartfelt countryish folk song, not prettified or overproduced, with a singer whose voice had a memorably wavering, rustic bittersweetness - drawing them together.
The song was "Come Here" by Kath Bloom, and it was always strange that she didn't use that exposure to become better known; she had the same vocal allure as Lucinda Williams, the folkish Neil Young or Karen Dalton. It turns out Bloom was busy raising a family, able only to privately issue cassettes or CD-Rs to small audiences of devotees. But she recently has started to record properly in the studio again, with her musician husband Stan Bronski producing and playing bass and mandolin.
While some of the material on Terror was written earlier, the title song and "Your House Was Burning" are brand-new compositions. Not that it matters. She is still so unfamiliar a name that all of this will be new to most listeners. The album is marvelous - these folk-rock songs are concise observations about life lived and love won and lost, filled with an eerie poetic edge that can make you shiver. "Everything Looks Different at Night" contains this line, for instance: "A friend of mine once told me that you can learn to love anything at all/I guess I better learn to love these rocks below this cliff before I fall." Bloom sings it, extending the syllables and whole lines in that off-kilter voice, as if she's falling, or maybe floating above us all. It gives her a haunting, ghostlike presence; she's someone you would expect to meet at the wrecking ball, way past midnight, and then never come home. Almost all the songs here have appealing melodies, unassuming folk-rock accompaniment (that does indeed rock) and vivid subject matter - "Midnight Moon," "Just Can't Handle It," "Moon Through a Dusty Window" and the recorded-live "Most Beautiful Day" are sterling examples. Bloom also contributes evocative harmonica at critical points; while Heidi Randall provides soothing backing vocals on several songs.
Bloom isn't a rustic, backwoods outsider musician whose songs came in a vision. She's actually the daughter of an accomplished oboist, Robert Bloom, and a trained cello player whose first albums displayed an avant-gardist's love for the eccentricities of folk and blues - an "old, weird America" aesthetic before Greil Marcus named it. In conjunction with Terror, Chapter Music has released as a two-disc set albums she made with the adventurous guitarist Loren MazzaCane Connors, 1982's Sing the Children Over and 1983's Sand In My Shoe.
The first shows her developing style, including original compositions along with a delightful "I've Been Working on the Railroad" and other traditional songs. The second contains original compositions, all appealing, and the CD adds several live cuts from 1981. Another two-disc set will be released later this year. It's not too late for Bloom to get discovered - Terror shows her at the top of her skills. So don't be late discovering her.
Standout Tracks: Terror: "Everything Looks Different At Night," "Terror"; Sing the Children Over/Sand In My Shoe: "Last Fair Deal," "My Stupid Little Heart" STEVEN ROSEN
