Early in his career, he employed a fluid, bluesy fingerpicking approach, but around the late 1980s began using a plectrum and developed a percussive strumming style that brought an ebullient energy to albums like “Riverside,” “Turf,” and “The Acoustic Motorbike” that helped him build a wide audience. No words,” he writes in the album liner notes), taking inspiration from recordings of assorted traditional tunes interpreted by Steve Cooney, Iarla O’Lionaird, Peadar O’Riada, and the duo of Martin Hayes and Denis Cahill, then crafting his own pieces.īloom’s guitar musicianship does warrant attention, in no small part because he’s changed it out of necessity over the years due to recurring tendinitis.
So every day, over a period of nine months, he sat and played guitar (“No songs. Early on in the lockdown, Bloom explained in an interview with The Irish Times this past spring, he discovered that singing without an audience – whether in a virtual performance or for practice – was unsatisfying, even saddening. Technically, this is the second Bloom album since the pandemic arrived, “Bittersweet Crimson” having come out the summer of last year but that one was largely recorded before the spring 2020 lockdown, while “Out of the Blue” took shape as the crisis deepened. Much of the 11 tracks are solo, while others include backing with various combinations of fiddle (Adam Shapiro), trumpet (Susan O’Neill) and double bass, mandola, synthesizer and electric guitar (Jon O’Connell, who also served as producer), some of the arrangements and tonal quality reminiscent of Mike Oldfield’s 1970s folk/progressive-rock longform pieces, or the cross-genre stuff that (guitarist, not composer) John Williams has done.
It’s an all-instrumental production, putting his guitar playing at center stage with a mix of traditional Irish tunes and his own compositions.
Well, Bloom has indeed produced his state-of-the-Covid album – just not the one you necessarily might’ve expected. If anyone was going to offer a unique take on the Covid era, surely it would be Luka Bloom, right? After all, he’s long been one of Ireland’s most forthright singer-songwriters, creating deeply felt meditations about human experience and interaction – tragic, comic, glorious – on the personal scale or across history and populations, and delivered in his incomparable voice, sometimes as a song, sometimes as an invocation, always with a heartening sincerity.
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