Luke Concannon – Midnight Bloom (2025)
At the beginning of the second verse of ‘Shine’, Luke Concannon sings: “I want to embrace this whole forest/ Fight racism like I’m Chuck Norris.” It’s a dangerous couplet to present so early in the opening song to his new record, Midnight Bloom. The listener could perform a violent eye roll and turn it off because heartfelt enthusiasm rarely plays well in modern music unless you’re complaining about something like totalitarianism or an ex-lover. But Concannon’s music comes from a heart-on-the-sleeve ethic that is present on every song and is equal to his musicianship in distinguishing his music in a wide and cluttered landscape of styles.
Concannon is one-half of the folk duo Nizpoli that released their debut album, Half These Songs Are About You, back in 2004 and scored a surprise hit with ‘JBC’. Since then, Concannon has been active both as part of the duo and as a solo artist, steadily maintaining a presence in a style he describes as “[s]piritual, activist folk hip-hop.” This presence has not gone unnoticed. Pop musician Ed Sheeran has described Concannon as one of his “musical heroes.”
Concannon began Midnight Bloom back in 2020 with Darius Christian, a multi-instrumentalist who handles, among other things, horn arrangements and rapping duties. The album’s gestation followed Concannon through a three-year-long illness, to emerge as a 28-minute collection of eight songs that take on a balance of pressing issues with a relational focus and relational issues with the urgency of a hot-button topic.
Of the former, ‘Brother’ is a standout track featuring Christian, who takes on the points of view of a Ukrainian and Russian soldier in a dialogue separated by geopolitical abstractions. Of the latter, ‘A Woman Is Sacred’ has the feel of a centerpiece of a musical as the female voice (which may be Danielle Moreland-Ochoa or Stephanie Hollenberg) slowly uncovers a wounded emotional landscape to the male voice’s passionate insistence.
While the faint glimmer of keyboards can be heard here and there, Concannon constrains his hip-hop, soul, and R&B influences to a sound that is almost obsessively acoustic. The album opens with two components of its foundation as a standup bass vamps over an acoustic guitar playing a pedal tone. When the drums kick in, you can hear that they have been recorded in a way that captures the ambience of the kit, a sound you are more likely to hear on a jazz record.
This foundation remains throughout the album, and Concannon and Christian build on it with vocal and horn arrangements that give the songs a deeply human texture. ‘Human’ should be an obvious assumption when it comes to music, but these days it is becoming an increasingly necessary adjective. Even so, Midnight Bloom speaks to more than simply not being AI-generated. There is an overall lack of technologically driven sounds that, by their absence, give the album a presence that one rarely hears, even in folk music.
I admit, activist songs are not my cup of tea, but Concannon has created something so deeply musical and bound up in his own passion for life, something so deeply, again, human, that I can’t help but be drawn to his work. This is a special record that deserves to be heard.
Find out more about Luke Concannon on his official website, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Soundcloud and Spotify.
This artist was sent to us via Measure PR.
