- Melbourne label Chapter Music deliver a long-awaited vinyl reissue of the short run Kath Bloom & Loren Connors 1984 record Restless Faithful Desperate. The label previously issued the album on CD in 2009, but this vinyl pressing marks the first time that the record will be available outside of the absurdly hard to find original two-hundred-copies released in 1983 on Connor’s own St. Joan label.
Loren Connors is perhaps best known for his ambient and experimental guitar work, which has seen him collaborate with such guitar luminaries as Jim O’Rouke, Keiji Heino and Alan Licht. While Bloom is perhaps best known for her composition Come Here, originally recorded with Connors, but prominently featured in a fleshed out folk-pop form in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise.
The collaborative efforts of the duo offer a stripped back folk-blues guitar combo with a flair for the startlingly avant-garde. Bloom’s melodically fingerpicked chords are underpinned by Connor’s adventurous and unpredictable lead lines. At times he emphasises the textural qualities of his instrument, utilising a great deal of vibrato, bends and scratching, while at other times he seems to focus on creating a stubborn realm of rhythmic and harmonic complexity under Bloom’s compositions.
Connors' contributions are cursorily simple in distinction to Bloom’s plaintive songwriting, rhapsodic vocals and balanced guitar playing, but his presence adds to the undefinably delicate atmosphere of the recordings. The sound of Connors' sighing, the tapping of feet, bumps of instruments and the movement through the room poetically attune to Bloom’s songs, with an air of intimacy between the players that reflects the honesty of their creative partnership.
Bloom’s voice is almost unparalled in its emotional power, moving fluidly between abstract broken lines, sincere rhythmic blues and operatic highs. The quality of Bloom’s songwriting on Restless is also startling, with so many memorable songs like How We Live or When Your Dreams Come True departing from the familiar palette and arriving at vastly different emotional places. The more composed Look At Me plays up the formal elements of her songwriting and is reminiscent of Bloom’s more recent work, featuring a subdued electric guitar solo from Robert Crotty, who also flirts with guitar harmonics.
Outside of the included bonus track, Tell Him, which sits at the end of the record and was originally part of a compilation by American folk music magazine Fast Folk, the album is otherwise structurally unaltered on this reissue. The track is an interesting addition, but it feels like a bit of an outlier among the rest of the album's largely pensive and emotionally dense songs. The record itself is imbued with such an energy, a creative life-force and emotional honesty: it’s hard to imagine that such a vital record existed in such obscurity for so long and through the efforts of the label is only now seeing it’s second pressing.
- Jaden Gallagher.