BY JOE KILLE

In print | Published January 20, 2005

In the brief note accompanying his new album, “Before Sleep Comes,” singer and guitarist Luka Bloom wishes the listener sweet dreams. It’s not often that you’re given an album that’s being touted by its record company (and, even more shockingly, its artist) as an album of “non-performances” whose purpose is to “bring you closer to sleep.”

But that’s exactly what this album delivers. When I read the press release for Before Sleep Comes I imagined that Mr. Bloom had unwittingly created a compilation of dull and unimportant songs, and that his record company was doing all it could to salvage the wreck by marketing it as a “chill-out” album. On the contrary, the circumstances of the album speak to its intentional tranquility. While suffering from aggravated tendonitis in his right hand, Mr. Bloom was forced to modify his picking style and play music on a nylon-stringed classical guitar instead of his usual harsher-sounding steel-string. It was from these conditions that his new approach to playing arose and the concept for “Before Sleep Comes” was born. All the songs were recorded late at night, when, as Mr. Bloom puts it, “I was tired myself.”

The music presented is beautiful and, yes, tranquil. “Before Sleep Comes” achieves exactly what Mr. Bloom intended. You don’t as much listen to the songs as feel them, losing the lyrics in the rise and fall of his voice. Bloom originals like “Nora, Be Still Now” and “Camomile” are seamlessly intertwined with traditional Irish ballads, like “She Moved Through the Fair” and “The Water is Wide.”

Another album that blends arrangements of traditional music with similar originals is Ozark Sheiks, the debut by the Arkansas duo Uncle Cuckleburr’s Champion Possum Carvers. Where Luka Bloom whispered to his guitar, these guys sing, gurgle, pop, scream, and yodel to an assortment of banjos, guitars, mandolins, jugs, kazoos (lovingly referred to as “throat fiddles”), and more as they plow through twenty old-time originals and lesser-known traditionals.

My first reaction after hearing the opening track “Run, Nellie, Run” was the incredible desire to see these guys play live. Pictures of the two person band reveal sometimes-complex arrangements of jugs and kazoos in harmonica holders to add a little inappropriate-sounding percussion here and there.

I can’t speak to the authenticities of their performances. What UCCPS set out to do is record a style of music prevalent in America before recording equipment was readily available. Their spirit takes them back to that time, and shines through especially on tracks like “Sycamore Tree,” “Ozark Sheiks” (an original), and “No Low Down Hanging Around/Bay Rum Blues.”

It’s heartening to think that there are musicians in the world more concerned with the integrity of their music than with instantaneous marketability or derivative appeal. Both UCCPS and Luka Bloom set out to achieve very specific goals with their albums, and these goals seem more important to the performers than to the listener. Mr. Bloom sought to record a period in his life when he was forced to quiet down and go slowly; he finds a place before sleep worth preserving. UCCPS look to preservation, but theirs is a time and place that no one (not even them) can be sure they’ve heard before. In both cases, it’s a lovely and sometimes exhilarating journey to take with them.

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