Fresh Listen - Kath Bloom, Finally (Chapter Music, 2005)
(Some pieces of recorded music operate more like organisms than records. They live, they breathe, they reproduce. Fresh Listen is a periodic review of recently and not so recently released albums that crawl among us like radioactive spiders, gifting us with superpowers from their stingers.)
Aside from two songs, the 2005 reissue of Kath Bloom’s Finally is a collection of music Bloom put to wax in the 1990′s, that popular music universe of Nirvana’s Nevermind and In Utero, Pearl Jam’s Ten and Vs., Smashing Pumpkins’s Siamese Dream, the end of 10,000 Maniacs and the beginning of solo Natalie Merchant, that era bridging grunge’s forbears and their less winsome successors (Silverchair, Bush), and the radio dominance of the female singer/songwriter (Sarah McLachlan, Paula Cole, Shawn Colvin, Lisa Loeb, Joan Osborne), and the true oddities of the 90′s pop music scene: Crash Test Dummies’s “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm,” Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping,” Freak Nasty’s “Da Dip.” None of which sympathetically resonates with the work of Kath Bloom (unless you count a few plucked notes of an acoustic guitar in “Sunny Came Home” or “Stay (Because I Missed You).” Like Alan Lomax’s field recordings of sharecroppers and criminals, or Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Kath Bloom’s songs sound captured out of time--not through Shure microphones and multi-channel boards onto DAT recorders, but in the middle of porch jam sessions and bedroom introspection. Bloom and her accompanying musicians are beautiful amateurs with a whole lot of soul. The magic Bloom generates with her limited set of tools--her singing especially--reveal a profound spirit, an almost ugly thing with its nakedness made clearer by Bloom’s willful forsaking of virtuosity and technical ambition. The success of each song is dependent on, not mitigated by, Bloom’s overall musical weirdness and peculiar sense of time.
The first and probably most famous track, “Come Here,” manifests the intense yearning of someone who has just discovered the depths of their desire, after so much unconscious repressing. This overwhelming, portrayed in the moment by Bloom, has crossed the threshold of the abstract and crossed over onto the physical plane. Myself, I’ve always heard “Come Here” as every person whose love I didn’t deserve singing to me. I listen to the song feeling wholeheartedly unworthy, the purest feelings directed at me remaining out of reach because my resistance, my selfishness, my stupidity, my refusal to acknowledge the sentiment and hold it close.
“Forget About Him,” a brassy country tune, exhibits Bloom’s sense of humor while confronting the tragedy of a break up. For Bloom, life goes on after love departs, and though she repeatedly takes the temperature on her state of mind as she pines, she is well aware that there are enough external distractions in the course of a day--the dog, the rooster, the boy nearby--to occupy her attention as she reluctantly heals.
Bloom questions the notion of value in “A Homeless Dream,” a sketch of a song that imagines money as an abstract means of salvation. This inquiry continues in “What Is Really Beautiful,” which attacks the cultural value of permanence. This need for sticking around, Bloom sings, is why we live in fear, the unconscious drive to obtain what cannot be grasped: a sense of forever. What is really beautiful--what has the most significance--is the changing, the aging, the passing away. The strength to say goodbye is worth more than any blockchain of cryptocurrency.
“I’m gonna pay, until I know that it’s okay / then I can go on with my life” from “Can’t Rise to Your Feet” is the most succinct description of the existence we all have the pleasure of muddling through, that sense of a struggle past one constructed obstacle to the next, enjoying, when we can, the resting moments when being ourselves is not predicated on fighting to gain or maintain some society-acclaimed status or additional material wealth. This ongoing war within ourselves and against our neighbors, all of us fooled into fighting for the same things, is the root of so much depression, the inability to engage after the the world and its excruciating expectations have wrung one out.
One day in the future, “Fall Again” will be welcomed unequivocally into the great American songbook. Its overcast melody, and the gritty longing Bloom evokes through her lyrics, is not far removed from the ballads fo Billie Holiday or Sarah Vaughn. “Fall Again” is simply another facet of Bloom’s talent. Despite her arresting strangeness, she can just as easily put across a love song applicable to any genre.
“In Your School” is a children’s song, willfully silly, that evolves into an older folk expression (life / death / the seasons) as it goes along. In “Sand in My Shoe,” another loose number in which the percussion follows the non-committally strummed guitar, Bloom, always the pilgrim, wanders only to arrive at some final truth: the desire-free cease of all wandering. One of the few extended instrumental breaks bursts through in “We Crossed Over,” while “Who You Are,” a more carefully produced track, could have, with its easy hand drums and steel guitar, been a minor hit in the singer/songwriter-centric 70′s.
If a neo-country band had the stones to to remake “I Wanna Love,” with its pop ambitions among its heartburned wisdom (”I know you gotta have the pain in order to have the growth”), Bloom might achieve the musical popularity in which, during her career, she seemed completely uninterested. At this juncture, though, its seems our listening masses are too concerned with the next shiny and loud noise from the Industry. The quieter, more truthful songs reside in those dark rooms of the imagination, those rooms the general listenership avoids, now that listeners can be played with and strung along for as long as it takes.
Finally “Finally,” in which Bloom strips away even the minimal accompaniment that has meandered with her thus far, singing along to her own imperfectly strummed guitar. If Bloom only wrote one song to validate her carer as an important musician, let it be this one--there is no line that is inappropriate in “Finally,” no evocation that is not overflowing with earned emotion. It is the perfect love song from a real poet, not a schmaltzy, showbiz type. Though there are several peaks of genuine feeling that arise in Bloom’s performance, when she sings “the light, the light” it seems that she herself is surprised by the deeps of her depth, possessed by demons she didn’t necessarily realize she was summoning.
Finally is the the kind of album that would make fans of technically correct music, rendered soulless by its production, gnash their teeth in irritation. As fully baked as Bloom’s art is, its execution is raw. Invigorating. Her timing errors and missed cues, after regular listens, become endearing, self-correcting, almost indelible to the understanding of each plaintive and life-affirming song.
