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E-mailLukas Oldie But Goodie
"You don't want to write about that," wrote Luka Bloom in an e-mail when I asked him for an interview on "Tribe," the album he released a few years ago that has finally made its debut online over here.
"I'm already onto other things. I'm just mixing a new album in New York, so let's save up the ink for that!"
Fair enough, but when you are as talented as Luka Bloom and incapable of recording a dud album, a music critic will never have a shortage of ink in which to sing your praises. Besides, Tribe is an album that everyone should know about, so consider this review a community service!
"Every time I fall it's a new beginning," he reasons on "Change." Anyone who has followed his career lately knows that Bloom's lyric has become a way of life for him.
Tribe is unlike anything Bloom has ever recorded. The lyrics and vocal deliveries are quiet affairs, and they are blended with bleak atmospheric musical beds.
The soundscape is reminiscent of the spooky atmospherics that producer Daniel Lanois throws into the mix on U2's ballads. Metal picks screech across electric guitar strings to create the feel of backing vocals. Gentle electronica percolates in the background. Pedal steel guitars blend with drowsy guitar chords as the singer whispers his prose.
Tribe delivers a consistent mood from start to finish that is equal parts mellow and restless at the same time.
"I am a river passing through/this is what he do/standing on a corner of a Dublin street/staring at a sea of busy little feet/going about our business, push push shove/hoping in our lifetime we'll find and be in love," Bloom sings on "I Am a River" as a watery, echoed guitar plays in the background.
On "Lebanon," he sings over a frisky clarinet, electronic jabs, and a supple standup bass of a land with "blood stained footsteps in the shifting sand" that has a lot in common with Northern Ireland, with "every generation seeing these wars before, caught between a rock and a hard, hard place."
One of the most striking musical moments on Tribe is "Homeless," a spoken word piece about the singer's encounter with someone less fortunate than him during a trip to California.
"It was a homeless man who got me thinking/I felt the usual mix of sorrow for him and the anger for a society that makes a man live like this," he begins in a smoky, sexy delivery that would give Liam Neeson a run for his money.
You sort of roll your eyes at first, thinking this is yet another folkie rallying against the "haves" on behalf of the "have nots." Luka then throws the listener a curveball by turning the critical eye on himself.
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