Get to church on Sunday

Music Row
By Brian Rademaekers

Philly’s longtime DIY promoters are giving us good reason to head to church this Sunday for a special evening of music that blends the sacred and profane in all the right ways.
On the bill for a special seated show in the stunningly gorgeous Sanctuary at the First Unitarian Church are Mark Kozelek and Kath Bloom.
Both offer a hushed, contemplative style of songwriting well-suited for the space. Kozelek is a 41-year-old Ohioan who has made his way around America and the American music scene over the last two decades, offering his unique songwriting through several collaborations.
Perhaps his best-known stage presence is Red House Painters, a band that debuted in 1992 on the LP Down Colorful Hill. Kozelek’s primary partner during those years was drummer Anthony Koutsos, who helped form the band in 1989.
That album emerged with the help of the renowned, but cultish, Mark Eitzel, founder of the band American Music Club and a figure on the San Francisco Bay scene in the 1980s. Eitzel has long lauded the band and helped them land their first deal with 4AD Records.
Both Eitzel and Kozelek offered introspective and cerebral songs delivered in a style of rock more subdued than most of the stuff being put out at that time. And while both musicians were known for their raw-emotion honesty, Kozelek is widely seen as the more direct of the two.
Putting him in a rare class of American songwriters, Kozelek made his name by offering songs that were direct and to the often-painful point. Not one for allusion and metaphor, Kozelek’s songs go for the jugular and lay out his darkest thoughts and fears in language that is simultaneously honest and beautiful. These frank dirges have been most often delivered alongside downbeat melodies, sludgy tempos and stark arrangements that let the lyrics shine.
A string of albums carried Red House Painters through the 1990s to 2001’s belatedly released Old Ramon. The album, recorded in 1997, was a more buoyant and guitar-rich work than most recorded by the Painters and helped to bolster Kozelek’s songwriting reputation.
In 2002, Kozelek formed Sun Kil Moon, a band made up of Koutsos, Geoff Stanfield and Tim Mooney. The band broke out the next year with Ghosts of the Great Highway, a well-received collection of 10 songs.
Of late, the prolific Kozelek has released a number of live compilations, including his deconstructed takes on AC/DC songs, his tributes to John Denver and some Christmas numbers on 2007’s White Christmas/Little Drummer Boy Live.
And to call Kozelek "prolific" is no overstatement. The songwriter just broke out a U.S.-printing of Nights of Passed Over, a 256-page compilation of his written works.
Sun Kil Moon also just released April, their full-length album to date and a delicate assortment of tunes on par with earlier works that evoke Neil Young and Nick Drake. Fans can look for a live version of these new works along with a dose of his old at Sunday’s show.
On the first half of the program, Connecticut’s Kath Bloom brings an even richer history of penning superb lyrical songs.
Getting her first recorded works out in 1976 through a collaboration with avant-garde guitarist Loren MazzaCane Connors, Bloom, the daughter of renowned oboist Robert Bloom, was already a seasoned musician at the time of her first official recordings.
In all, the Bloom-Connors partnership spanned eight years, with their fifth and final album, Moonlight, released in 1984.
After that, Bloom receded into a relatively quiet domestic life as a struggling single mother in her hometown of New Haven, where locals were lucky enough to be treated to occasional live shows. Somewhere along the line, director Richard Linklater "discovered" Bloom’s music and in 1995 worked her song Come Here into his film Before Sunrise.
The renewed interest revived her career and pushed her to record 1999’s Come Here: The Florida Years.
Several albums of previously unreleased recordings emerged, as did new original works that have earned her a new following.
Her latest work is Terror, a 15-track release recorded over the last three years and just released on Chapter Music. On Terror, Bloom offers listeners her haunting voice in the delivery of superbly written songs draped in delicate finger-picking and tender harmonica. ••

Check it out . . .
What: A seated show of songwriting masters in the First Unitarian’s Sanctuary
Who: Kath Bloom and Mark Kozelek
Where: The Church, 2125 Chestnut St.
When: Sunday, June 15, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $14. All ages.