Bhi Bhiman
Rhythm & Reason
(BooCoo Music/Thirty Tigers)
Like Mathangi Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A, Bhi Bhiman is a Sri Lankan with Tamil roots who grew up outside that troubled country. Unlike M.I.A, he was raised in St Louis not Hounslow and instead of throwing his energies into a sonic stew of world music, hip-hop and lo-fi electronica as she did, he adopted the classic rock and soul sounds of the US.
On the basis of this third album, his billing as "the Sri Lankan Woody Guthrie" isn't credible but the oft-voiced comparisons with Bruce Springsteen don't seem quite so wide of the mark. His voice has the same strident passion and, with their workaday guitar riffs and rolling keyboard parts, his muscular compositions have a timeless, mid-1970s E Street Band kind of feel that's impossible to dislike.
The songs have a political edge too: opener Moving To Brussels is a break-up song rooted in the immigrant experience, Up In Arms is written from the viewpoint of Black Panther Huey Newton, while over a lolloping reggae groove on There Goes The Neighbourhood, Bhiman takes on the persona of a tut-tutting American conservative. "Let's just push out all the bums/From our ghettoes and our slums/Send them back to where they're from," he sings. An intelligent and well-wrought set of songs.
Barry Didcock
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