Pop Music Review : Luka Bloom: No Garden-Variety Folkie

Luka Bloom came to the Coach House on Tuesday night and put on your average, everyday solo-folkie show--you know, the kind that comes with rap, reggae, laughter, romance, whoops, whispers, and a low E-string vibrating in Sensurround.

The Irish singer-songwriter’s resourcefulness and versatility enabled him to make a concert of almost two hours seem too short. If he could do that well on June 14, which was Flag Day, think of the possibilities when he plays tonight at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. After all, June 16, as any James Joyce enthusiast will remind you, is Bloomsday.

Luka Bloom was Barry Moore before he came to the United States eight years ago to right a foundering career. He spliced together a new name for himself from the title of a Suzanne Vega hit and from Leopold Bloom, the character whose fictitious wanderings around Dublin on June 16, 1904, were chronicled by Joyce in his great novel, “Ulysses.”

No Joyce worshiper, the singing Bloom chose his stage name out of sheer whimsy. The Irish icons who figured most prominently in his stage chat at the Coach House were not literary but pop cultural: the national soccer team (to whose success in the World Cup he dedicated a rousing encore, “Delirious”) and Shane MacGowan, the former Pogues singer whose alarming table manners were the subject of one of the show’s wry anecdotes.

Faced with an adoring audience of about 300, Bloom affably tossed out one-liners and generally proved himself up to par in the wit and charm departments so vital to any solo folkie’s success, and so very much expected if that folkie happens to be Irish. (Far from pouring on the blarney, though, the Dublin-based Bloom went in for no stock Irish humor.)

His sound owed more to devices associated with up-to-date, atmospheric alternative rock bands than it did to the solo-acoustic tradition. He boosted his amplified guitars with electronic effects that made the treble strings glisten and ripple in a bath of warm, liquid reverberation. Meanwhile, the bass strings rumbled as if their vibrations belonged on the soundtrack of a disaster film.

If occasionally obtrusive, these sonic treatments gave Bloom a broad palette from which to work. He used it to varied purposes, alternating between galloping anthems that found him flailing at the guitar strings as fast and hard as he could, and ballad reveries supported by delicate strumming.

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He didn’t hesitate to plunge into his strong new album, “Turf,” pulling 10 songs from it, even though Tuesday was the first day it was available in stores. He went back to his 1992 release, “The Acoustic Motorbike,” for five more songs, dipped into his 1990 debut, “Riverside,” for just one, and debuted an unfinished new romantic agony song that he played more for laughs than for tears.

It took him a few songs to warm up. “Freedom Song,” a prosaic, somewhat soapboxy ode to femalecivil rights leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, was a questionable opening choice. But he found his footing with another topical song, “Background Noise.” This biting account of how easy it is to ignore horrors only slightly removed from one’s own immediate turf fully exploited Bloom’s ability to move from an urgent, low near-whisper to the even more urgent upper reaches of his range. That ability to negotiate the high notes surely and clearly yielded the singer many an emotional payoff and rewarded listeners with many a chorus lifted by a lovely, evocative melody.

With songs of politics and fervent romance, aggressive strums and moments of rippling calm, Bloom put enough musical and thematic strands in play to avoid sameness, the bane of the solo performer. His lyrics were more likely to portray character types--the pining or ardent lover, the mourner, the outraged social observer--than detailed individuals. At the same time, songs gained depth from the writer’s attention to settings and images of natural beauty.

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In putting his song list together, Bloom paid attention to the way songs might complement each other in meaning or style. In a particularly good pairing, he sang “Sanctuary,” a deeply melancholy, meditative farewell set at his mother’s graveside, then followed it with “Diamond Mountain” in which a swelling chorus conveyed more sad longing yet allowed the singer to find comfort in the permanency of one of Ireland’s natural landmarks.

In another pairing, this one along stylistic lines, he played a lightly skipping reggae-beat version of Prince’s “When Doves Cry” and followed it with the dark, surging struggle-reggae of his own, “The Fertile Rock,” an environmental anthem whose gravity and chant-like quality would make it sound at home on a Midnight Oil album.

Toward the end, Bloom got into his own brand of romantic Celtic rap, both in his own “Holding Back the River” (in which the semi-spoken rhymes of the verses give way to a richly melodic chorus) and his crowd-pleasing cover of LL Cool J’s hip-hop ballad “I Need Love.”

The mix also included some delicate water music: “Exploring the Blue,” in which a fervent Bloom takes a figurative plunge in search of pearls of romance, and “Sunny Sailor Boy,” a sweetly wafting song, written by Mike Scott of the Waterboys, about a mermaid who doubles as a muse. It should come as no surprise that a singer as attuned as Bloom to mixing flavors in solo performance would serve up a song of the surf on a very good album called “Turf.”