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.
