William Ruhlmann (All Music Guide)

Expatriate Irishman Luka Bloom cloaks his Celtic folk songs in furious strumming on his "electro-acoustic" guitar, added instrumentation, and echo effects on everything, but he is still a folkie, blowing up his feelings to heroic proportions, whether it's the autobiography of "The Man Is Alive" or the romantic fantasy of "An Irishman In Chinatown." But the content is less convincing than the expression, which is more a characteristic of rock than folk. It isn't that Bloom has much to say, it's that he's so passionate about saying it: he's more Bono than Bob Dylan. Maybe it's an Irish thing.

(CD Universe)

Personnel: Luka Bloom (vocals, acoustic, electric & 12-string guitars); Jeffrey Wood (guitar, keyboards); Ed Tomney (guitar); Eileen Ivers (fiddle); David Mansfield (mandolin); Jane Scarpantoni (cello); Conor Byrne (flute); David Hofstra, Ronnie S. Champagne (bass); Bob Riley (drums, percussion); Liam O'Maonlai (bodhran); Ali Fatemi (tombak).
Recorded at R.P.M. Studios, New York, New York; S.T.S., Dublin, Ireland; and Track Record, Los Angeles, California.

So Luka Bloom is famed Irish singer/songwriter Christy Moore's younger brother, and yes, they both play a raucous acoustic guitar and sing of tormented souls and lost love; that doesn't mean that Bloom is overshadowed by his older sibling. By any standards, RIVERSIDE is a mature and stunning debut.
Although on some tracks Bloom (his adopted first name was inspired by the Suzanne Vega song) uses some fine Irish and American accompanists (Eileen Ivers on fiddle, Jane Scarpantoni on cello), RIVERSIDE mostly features his guitar and deeply expressive voice. Sometimes a husky whisper ("Gone to Pablo"), sometimes a plaintive wail ("Delirious") Bloom's voice is as much an instrument as the percussive timekeeping on the side of his acoustic guitar. "You Couldn't Have Come at a Better Time" expresses exuberant delight at the return of an errant lover, and if "An Irishman in Chinatown" verges on stage Irish, it's still a rave-up worthy of the Chieftains, or perhaps even Christy Moore himself. An emotional gem of a debut.

(CMJ New Music Report, 191, March 16, 1990)

Transplanted from his native Ireland to America some two years ago, Luka Bloom has also recorded in the past under his real name, Barry Moore; if that surname rings familiar in the Irish singer/songwriter category, it's because Luka's actually the brother of feisty Irish folk singer Christy Moore. Bloom's folkish, sharply honed melodies drive their points home unadorned by unnecessary instrumental accompaniment; he's sparsely backed by his guitar, subtle basslines, an occasional mandolin or fiddle, and often punctuates his lyrics with bolder, more electric-sounding guitar flourishes. There's a thread of good ole Irish longing, lamentation and whiskey-drenched sorrow here, and a dark and disturbing undercurrent of melancholy that runs through atmospheric and moody songs like "The One," "Delirious," "Dreams In America," "Gone To Pablo" or even the hushed chill of "The Hill Of Allen," which closes out the album with its mysterious and introspective instrumental coda.

Paul Evans (RollingStone, 573)

I was brought up near the riverside/In a quiet Irish town/An eighteen-month-old baby/The night they laid my Daddy down.... My home was filled with sorrow then, too much for me to tell," sings Luka Bloom on "The Man Is Alive," a sharp lament gracing his soaring major-label debut album, Riverside. Swirling toward a wisdom that sees all dead fathers as living in their children, the song echoes James Joyce's elegiac short story The Dead in its passionate acceptance – and in its tight-lipped euphoria nearly too strong for words.
The Joycean note isn't casual or contrived. Bloom took his name from the long-suffering Leopold Bloom, the hero of Joyce's Ulysses, and he's also the inheritor of a particularly Irish mix of mysticism and moonshine, a carousing spirituality that marks musicians as distinct as Van Morrison and U2.
Bloom's first name, Luka, from Suzanne Vega's song about domestic brutality, targets the folk vanguard (Vega, Tracy Chapman, Michelle Shocked) of which he aims to be a part. The singer and acoustic guitarist – a brother of the Irish folksinger Christy Moore – arrived in the United States two years ago, gathered a reputation for his electrifying live shows, sang backup on the Indigo Girls' "Closer to Fine" and honed his own brand of contemporary Celtic soul.
As much Leonard Cohen as Woody Guthrie, however, Bloom is a decidedly artful musician. A literary lyricist – "Nighthawks swagger in front of me/Sirens punctuate your symphony" – he draws his material less from the overt politics and proletarian grit of much traditional folk than from states of lovers' ecstasy and private revelation. "Gone to Pablo" captures his narrative gift most subtly; commemorating the love suicide of Picasso's second wife, the song paints death sadly but elegantly, with an almost pre-Raphaelite beauty.
Backed mainly by smoky, minimal percussion and his own deft guitar, Bloom's singing is distinctive for its clarity and conviction. Not one of folk's eccentric voices, he's a more tender deliverer; a touch of rough brogue coarsens – and personalizes – his bell-like style. It's a voice sutied to love songs, and fittingly, the best works on Riverside are ballads. On "This Is for Life," a tale of lovers separated by English prison bars, Bloom outright keens the chorus, his longing achieving a haunting, erotic strain.
There are shortcomings to Riverside. Some of the blarney humor of "An Irishman in Chinatown" is coy; the lyrics of "The One" verge on both the portentous and the trite. But Bloom's failings are lapses of an overheated ambition, and, in these days of lazy radio formula, trying too hard is a forgivable offense.
Celebrating warm flesh and spiritual fire, Riverside is a dazzling entrance. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, Jesse Winchester's first album and Robbie Robertson's glorious ballads delimit the ground Bloom examines. It's a brave territory – one Bloom has proven himself able and worthy to travel.