Kath Bloom is a spectacularly obscure singer-songwriter, known practically exclusively for the use of her song "Come Here" in a scene from Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise" (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, listening sweetly and awkwardly together in a record store). A new compilation of her work over the last couple of decades naturally leads off with that song, and includes some amusingly hyperbolic writing about how she's one of the greatest songwriters of our time. That's an absurd claim, but her work does have an appealing fragility to it, as if Joni Mitchell had lost some of her luster and picked up the outsider art sloppiness of the new folkers. I find her singing particularly affecting on "A Homeless Dream."
-- T.B.
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