Luka Bloom
Before Sleep Comes

The Latins had a simple term, a bare and immediate word that would have perfectly suited an album like this: "mostrum." Because, in today's musical landscape, these scarce thirty minutes of soft, hypnotic, refined music, fragrant and juicy like an apricot, silkily coquettish and seductive, are truly a marvel, a "rare beast," something truly unusual. In a world where everyone wants to "break" everything and everyone, often just for the sake of it, being able to enjoy these whispered tracks, this quiet and shadowy guitar, these lullabies for the heart and soul, can only be a balm for the spirit, a salvific shadow cone for our hearts scorched by the desertifying sun of haste and stress. This is a strange album, one to be sipped slowly before it can be fully appreciated. But listen after listen, it's like finding yourself on an autumn evening in front of a fireplace: it illuminates and warms you inside.

Brother to the more famous Christy Moore, Irish singer-songwriter Barry Moore started from excellent premises to build his moniker. He borrowed the name, Luka, from Suzanne Vega's song of the same name. The surname, Bloom, from none other than the protagonist of James Joyce's "Ulysses." And for the occasion, in this "Before Sleep Comes," he has also pulled these tracks from the silence to which he, an excellent guitarist, had been confined due to an unfortunate tendonitis in his left hand. Resorting to a Spanish guitar caressed like a lover, this album offers original tracks by Luka, some classic "standards," and purely instrumental episodes entrusted to the guitar's sole voice. But in this record, even the vocal tracks are more than just sung; they are truly only "whispered" with a thread of voice, with a breath that has something transcendent, mystical in it. Yes, because this is nighttime music, music to listen to in the sweet hypnosis that precedes the surrender to sleep, in the magic moment when all the muscles relax and thoughts sink into the dreaming swamp of the unconscious.

And it is in these extraordinarily lyrical and meditative atmospheres that the best moments of the record move. Like the wonderful "Camomile," one of the most tender and delicate tracks ever written, with its poetically lost text between the image of Mars blushing outside your window and the softness of the memory of two lips you still feel searching for yours. Or the equally astounding reinterpretation of "The Water Is Wide," which becomes disarmingly fragile, almost childlike, adolescent. Or the concluding "She Sings Her Songs With Open Eyes," which arpeggiates whispering until it fades into the silence of a night where you will languidly dream always of the same woman.

An essential album. Essential like sleep after a too hard day. Enjoy listening, then. And good relaxation to all.