Bhi Bhiman grew up in Ballwin, outside St. Louis, the son of Tamil immigrants from Sri Lanka. He is named after Bhima from the Mahabharata, and the music he was raised on was grunge, Soundgarden and Nirvana above all. When Bhiman came out in January 2012 he was 29, living in San Francisco, with a self-released album, The Cookbook, behind him. He has called this one his first real record.
He tracked most of it at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco with the engineer Jay Pellicci, and recorded a few of the sparer songs on his laptop. Then he took the mostly acoustic tracks to Sam Kassirer, whom he had met while opening shows for Josh Ritter, at the Great North Sound Society, a farmhouse of about 200 years in Parsonsfield, Maine. Kassirer produced and mixed it and filled it out with piano, organ and vibraphone. Ben Tudor plays double bass and Gabe Turow plays cajón.
Bhiman wrote all eleven songs, and the best of them are sung by someone else. “Guttersnipe”, the opener and lead single, runs almost seven minutes in the voice of an orphaned hobo who rides the rails and steals his meals. The narrator of “Kimchee Line” is a North Korean labourer, over voice and guitar alone, with a melody that borrows from Lead Belly’s “Rock Island Line” and a chorus that runs through vegetables. “The Cookbook” is sung, by Bhiman’s own account, as an Enron-style executive, over bowed double bass. “Ballerina” opens by reworking Johnny Cash and June Carter’s “Jackson” so that the couple marry in a Walmart, then follows an outlaw spree with room for Hank Williams Jr. and George Foreman grills.
The rest widens the range. “Crime of Passion” is a murder ballad on a solo 12-string. “Take What I’m Given” imagines a retiree who wants a quiet life in the country. “Mexican Wine”, barely a minute long, is the only instrumental. “Eye on You” is a jealous lover’s song with electric piano that, as The New York Times noted, comes close to acoustic disco.
The reviews in 2012 agreed on the voice, a big one he uses with care, and on the mix of humour and social conscience. Critics reached for Woody Guthrie, Randy Newman and John Prine, though The Washington Post pointed out that those names came from the press release; others heard Nina Simone, Bill Withers and Richie Havens. Robert Christgau gave it an A minus but found the rhythms stuck in a plain 4/4 and the personal songs weaker than the story songs.
That is a fair split. The character songs are what set the record apart, funny and unsettling in the same verse, and there are enough of them to carry it. Bhiman spent one week on Billboard’s Folk Albums chart, at No. 15. It deserved a longer run.
