Loving Takes This Course: A Tribute to the Songs of Kath Bloom
(Chapter Music)Kath Bloom
Thin Thin Line (Caldo Verde)A revered singer-songwriter from the New Haven, Conn., folk scene, Kath Bloom finally got her due on last year’s Loving Takes This Course, a 2-CD tribute compilation and greatest hits collection that mirrors 2004’s The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered in both style and stature. Original compositions dating back to 1981 and her earliest work as Hanford, Bloom, Mazzacane are haunting and startlingly honest ruminations on love in all its various stages and incarnations, often accented by the crooked, avant-garde guitar work of her onetime partner Loren Connors. Yet it’s through the prism of those she’s influenced that her expansive reach materializes. Bill Callahan fully embodies “The Breeze/My Baby Cries,” slowing the original into a meditative confessional. Over a solemn backdrop of Wurlitzer piano and percussion provided by Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg and Thor Harris, Callahan delivers Bloom’s stark poetry with resolved stoicism: “You can never be sure of the people you know when they don’t want to show you their sadness.” On the opposite side of the spectrum, Devendra Banhart takes a whimsical turn on the gender-bending “Forget About Him,” adding to the original with playful barnyard psychedelia and his 1960s croon, while Laura Jean’s aching harpsichord treatment of “When I See You” and the resolved blues of Scout Niblett’s solo “I Wanna Love” secure Bloom’s place in the old weird Americana canon. The Dirty Three’s Mick Turner and Peggy Frew offer a modern interpretation of “Window” akin to A Ghost Is Born-era Wilco (“Baby, don’t forget your promise to tell me who I am”), and Marble Sounds and Sweden’s the Concretes both give a lightly polished pop touch to Bloom’s trademark “Come Here,” originally featured in Richard Linklater’s 1995 film Before Sunrise. Red House Painters’ Mark Kozelek, who offers a bare take on Loving‘s “Finally,” recently released Bloom’s latest disc, Thin Thin Line, on his Caldo Verde imprint. Her voice has weathered like an old wooden door – high, weepy, and not always pleasant – but those imperfections add to the new album’s ghostly allure, at times recalling the Appalachian folk of Karen Dalton. Capturing what Bloom does best, Thin Thin Line balances the personal and political (standout these “Dangerous Days”) in wavering between desire and despair, as on the title track where she concedes, “It’s hard to remember where you’ve been when you’re in the kind of shape I’m in.” Sounds as if Kath Bloom’s back at her beginning, waiting once more for love to take its course.
(Loving Takes This Course) 
(Thin Thin Line)
This article appears in February 19 • 2010.