Tribe
Artist: Luka Bloom
Label: Cooking Vinyl 
ASIN: B000R34876 

For some time,  Luka Bloom has been coming across as a musical John O’Donohue with spiritually reflective songs that gathers up the mysticism of rural Irish life. Where his brother Christy is more likely to be singing about Dublin city’s hustle and bustle, greed, tragedy and injustice, Bloom drives us off to the bog land to find solace and refreshing and insight and hopefulness. _Tribe_ is a collaboration with Clare instrumentalist Simon O’Reilly and finds the distinctive guitar sound of Bloom giving way to sound-scapes and atmospheric moods which dress up the lyrical imagery of lambs seeking nipples, swallows flying home, boots on spades or trails of worms. Yes, the greed of Dublin is concerned upon but what we mostly find is Seamus Heaney’s rural poetry married to John O’Donohue’s post-Catholic spirituality wrapped up in Blue Nile moods. It is a thinking person’s music and from its rural Irish roots finds itself doing some travelling as it finds Yeats buried in Zurich, a little girl laughing in the midst of Lebanon’s tragedy, and a homeless man in LA sharing in his carbon footprint a message for the world. Bloom’s songwriting ability has never been doubted and he has been consistent in his album releases but Tribe is his most rounded and mature work to date.

Steve Stockman

Steve Stockman is the Presbyterian Chaplain at Queens University, Belfast, Ireland, where he lives in community with 88 students. He has written two books Walk On; The Spiritual Journey of U2 which he is currently updating and The Rock Cries Out; Discovering Eternal Truth in Unlikely Music. He dabbles in poetry and songwriting and he has a weekly radio show on BBC Radio Ulster (listen anytime of day or night @ www.bbc.co.uk/ni/religion/rhythmandsoul). He has his own web page--Rhythms of Redemption at http://stocki.ni.org . He also tries to spend some time with his wife Janice and daughters Caitlin and Jasmine.