Leo Bloom
Misery, Missouri (CD-R)
 Whether the title of Leo Bloom's Misery, Missouri is an unintentional juxtaposition of the Elliott Smith song from Good Will Hunting is up for debate I'd guess. Quite a coincidence. Happily, there is more to be had here than a standard rehash of Smith's strumming techniques. Instead of From A Basement on A Hill this could be called, "From a Horse Ranch in Missouri" for that's where it was recorded. This humble offering of thirteen songs is Bloom's first album, but don't let that fool you; he's opened for some largish indie names including: Karate, Jets to Brazil, and Of Montreal. Dang, with those kind of friends I'm surprised it took so long to release something!
The construction of the album is such that the songs are set to run into each other, so it's better to listen to the entire thing as a whole. As far as influences go, I have no idea where he's coming from other than it approaches alt-folk but is definitely quirkier than your usual folk disc. I'll make a lame-guess comparison: the songs sound cross like early Jason Lytle or Wayne Coyne fronting Mojave 3 or Norfolk and Western. Ok, I think I dropped enough names in that sentence.
The opener "Houdini" was my favorite song off the album...slightly mysterious and nicely framed by chiming bells and slide guitar. More of those fun bells appear on "You And a Dog" which takes what would be classed as a fairly standard acoustic strummer and inserts several random bars of weird chord progressions and vocals in several places throughout the songs. "Next Train" contains portions of what sound almost like rap. "Dead Bodies Breathing In B-Movies" takes the Sparklehorse step-waltz approach and ads harmonica and various cymbals. As far as vocals go Bloom hits both sweet and sour notes quite frequently. And although his voice can get a bit TOO melodramatically tinged at times, it sort of grows on you in that Jeff Mangum sort of way.
Leo Bloom picks his way carefully through inner demons and folk progressions and comes out of it with songs that are both inventive and funny and at times intensely personal. This is definitely going in my "non-trash" stack of review CDs.
- review by RABBIT (3.28.05)
Leo Bloom
miserymissouri@yahoo.com
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