Leaning into country music has been a lucrative and/or cynical career choice for generations of rockers from the Eagles to Kid Rock. Larkin Poe’s Rebecca and Megan Lovell have travelled in the opposite direction. Raised in Georgia on a diet of bluegrass, they got the downhome rootsy thing out of their systems early on before toughening things up with a shit-kicking, lap steel-heavy sound that makes Bob Ritchie sound like the Rust Belt huckster he really is.
Like their five previous albums, Bloom has country music in its heart and rock’n’roll in its veins. Mockingbird opens things with some spiralling slide guitar and deep organ, before Rebecca slides in with a vocal that switches up in a heartbeat from smokily soulful to lung-busting but never over-the-top.
Bloom doesn’t broaden the Larkin Poe sound, but it deepens it: the joy is more joyous, the heartbreak more alluring. Bluephoria is a Stax-inspired soul-rock vamp, the two-part Easy Love sees Rebecca wearing her romantic heart on the sleeve of her embroidered denim shirt.
‘Weighed down by doubt, sometimes I get stuck/But you know how to pull me out, cos you are my luck,’ she sings on the smouldering Part 2, presumably referring to co-producer and romantic partner Tyler Bryant (if she isn’t, he’s in trouble). Closing song Bloom Again is a twilit heartbreak ballad held up by delicate harmonies and the haunted ghost of a fiddle in the background, before it erupts with some dramatic slide guitar soloing.
On paper, Larkin Poe are a band, but really it’s all about that voice and that guitar sound, maybe with a few harmonies dusted on top. There are no concessions to passing trends here – no guest spots from passing rappers, no incongruous beats dropped in for clubs where they serve expensive bottles of vodka in roped-off areas. Bloom is as earthy as the dust blown up by a Tennessee gale, and if it sometimes wanders into cliché, so what? Rock’n’roll and Nashville are both built on clichés - it depends on how they’re delivered, and Larkin Poe deliver everything with style, clichéd or not.
‘You try to tell me what to do, you try tell me what to don’t/I do what I want, when I want,’ sings Rebecca threateningly on country-glam stomper Pearls. It’s a call for authenticity in a plastic world. With Bloom, Larkin Poe prove they’ve got the whole authenticity thing locked down.
