“Someone’s stepping on the gas / someone’s crawling up your ass /everybody wants to go fast,” Kath Bloom sings on the first song from her latest album, This Dream of Life. “Go fast,” a chorus of murmuring voices echoes back. By then, Bloom’s acoustic guitar, Jeff Hassay’s electric guitar, and Levi Strom’s percussion are in full swagger, a rock ‘n’ roll attitude poured into quieter instruments.
“We’re all crying in our chains / we’re all using half our brains,” Bloom sings. “Don’t you want to be free? Someone says they’re getting out / to tell me what it’s all about / but everyone is lying to me.”
Then the chorus suddenly opens up, like a good chorus is supposed to, except that it’s accomplished with just one instrument — the electric guitar, now swimming in atmosphere. “This dream of life is tearing us apart,” Bloom sings. “This dream of life is not for the faint of heart.” By then the tease of an echo around her own voice is more dominant, too. By the time she gets to her last word, the sound is almost in danger of drowning, until Hassay’s guitar, now crisp around the edges again, snaps it back to the swagger it had at the beginning.
This Dream of Life, released last week, is an album made by people who know what they’re doing, and the New Haven-based Kath Bloom really does. The daughter of an oboist, she started playing music as a child. With guitarist and composer Loren MazzaCane Connors, she recorded 11 albums between 1978 and 1984. A quiet period followed as Bloom raised her children. But director Richard Linklater’s use of her song “Come Here” in his 1995 movie Before Sunrise led to a resurgence of interest in her music, and with it, the rebirth of her recording career. Between 2008 and now, she has recorded six albums including This Dream of Life, and if this album is any indication, Bloom is very much going strong.
The sound of the album begins with Bloom’s voice. Earlier in her career, Bloom sang in a bright style, full of tone and vibrato. Decades later, she doesn’t sing like that; but with age has also come an expressiveness and an emotional directness that make her voice, with its raspier edge and a bit of a quaver, more distinctive. Her vocal instrument has changed, and she and the sound of her music have changed with it, in a way that feels lived in and earned. It allows for rougher guitar textures that might have seemed out of place in the past; now they’re right where they should be. The chorus of voices that rise around Bloom, as on “I Bring The Rains,” likewise swoops and swoons. It all works.
And what hasn’t changed is the sharpness of Bloom’s songwriting, filled with lines that bring you up short and songs that build, word by word, to stunning effect. “Reason for the sadness on this afternoon / is because you’re going away,” she sings on “Reminds Me Of It,” over a loping old country rhythm. “The clouds are low, I can’t escape impending doom / because you’re going away.”
At this moment it’s still just a song about someone leaving town. But as the music starts to suggest, Bloom is after bigger themes. “The sun burning in the sky reminds me of it,” she sings. “Moms and babies waving bye reminds me of it.” Voices join her on that repeated phrase, “reminds me of it.”
Then she croons, “I wish we didn’t have to die,” her voice breaking on the word “wish.” It’s a brave, direct line that could easily fall flat; instead, it’s heartbreaking, turning the rest of the chorus — its music around its repeated “yes, we’re going” line rising, almost triumphant — a statement about loss and acceptance that suddenly seems to take in the whole world, everyone we know and everyone we’ll never meet.
Simultaneously intimate and global, brimming with intelligence and experience, as Bloom’s songwriting swings from emotion to emotion, from humor to anger to sorrow to joy, there aren’t really any throwaways on This Dream of Life. It’s an album worth listening to from front to back just to be in Bloom’s company, at least until the next live show she does around here. Four decades into a prolific career, This Dream of Life finds Kath Bloom wide awake.
