Kath Bloom's voice wears the years beautifully. It may have lost some of the youthful agility that marked her work with guitarist Loren Conners in the 1980s, but she has gained a grace and gravity to match her age and experience. A cult figure from the tiny New Haven folk scene, Bloom is no retreating artist waiting to be rediscovered by a new generation: While she may not pursue music as determinedly as she once did, she never stopped recording or performing, whether solo or with a group of friends called the Love at Work Band. It's just that her records have usually been small-run releases, usually sold through her website and at the occasional show or folk-fest appearance. So credit goes to Australian label Chapter Music for giving her a wider audience by reissuing some of her 80s albums, collecting her 90s output on the 2007 comp Finally, releasing a strong collection of new material called Terror, and organizing a tribute album featuring Devendra Banhart, Bill Callahan, the Dodos, and Mark Kozelek.
Kozelek was apparently so taken with Bloom that he signed her to his Caldo Verde label and has released her latest album, Thin Thin Line. Again backed by members of the Love at Work Band, Bloom sounds like a woman who has spent years in the wilderness. Against the elegantly rustic folk backdrop, which swirls with fiddle and harmonica, she sings about fragile hearts and precarious relationships with tender, maternal authority (the album is dedicated to her son Jack). An earthy, unpretentious presence, she can snap a heart like a twig on the title track and "Heart So Sadly". Her voice is shaky and imprecise, but as always, it's all the more affecting for its imperfections. When she sings wordlessly and forcefully in her upper register on "Another Point of View", the effect is harrowing. When she whoops through "I'm Thinking of Love" or chirps out the sing-songy "Freddie", she sounds joyful even if her words are not.
This is an album about the thin line between happiness and sorrow. In conveying such emotional extremes, Bloom's songwriting remains startlingly direct in its plainspoken poetry. Bloom writes like she's working through problems, so her songs tend to build organically and gracefully. On "Heart So Sadly", she arrives at a sing-along melody that isn't just an effective hook, but a hard-won epiphany: "This is good, this is great/ This is good, this is great." It's simple, yet poignant. On "Let's Get Living", Bloom sings a chorus that in other hands might be simply a bromide: "If we're living, let's get living." In a sense, it's her "Let's Get It On", a desperate plea to move beyond arguments and grudges and just be together. But it's the lines that follow that reveal the stakes on this and every song on Thin Thin Line: "And if we're dying, let's just hope it's quick/ Without a lot of pain, not this bit by bit." Time is precious, and she's not wasting a moment.
