Begging Bowl by Bill Foreman

“By Its Very Nature Fleeting” is a triptych in song, pounding tom-toms and interlacing electric guitar and piano, with three college-aged narrators ruminating on death from three perspectives.

Bill returns to Irish-flavored instrumentals with “Planxty Steve Gonzales” before “The Stray Dogs of Dakar,” another slanted blues—imagine Skip James busking with an accordion player on the Champs-Élysées. Drawing on his own stay in Dakar, Bill takes a series of images of the city and frames them with the narrative of an orphaned, educated, and desperately poor taxi driver.

“El Chorrillo” stands as the album’s centerpiece, using a foul example of American war crimes in the 1989 invasion of Panama to critique the United States’ continuing military interventionism. The narrator, an American soldier, burns working-class Panamanian apartments while attmempting to dissociate from the experience with a variety of hallucinogens. The music takes an opposite tack, using an almost elegant folk-rock to throw the horror of the narrative into relief.

The mood lightens considerably with the garage-folk-rock flavored “Feeling No Pain (and Paying No Rent),” sending up the Federal Reserve’s deceptively easy credit policies in what is line-for-line the funniest song of the collection. Finishing the set out on a high note, “Eric’s Apartment” places Bill’s dear dog Eric in musical form, in what is certainly his catchiest instrumental since 1998’s “The Professah.”

“Begging Bowl” is standard-issue Bill Foreman, which is to say that it is anything but standard. Few artists can offer his particular combination of talents: melodies that sound both fresh and classic at the same time, intelligent lyrics without off-putting intellectualism, all by a musician who makes every last sound on the record, every instrument and every vocal. If you’re already a fan of Bill’s music, “Begging Bowl” will not disappoint. If you’re not yet a fan, “Begging Bowl” will make you one.

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