Send the Beggar

Item: Send the Beggar
Author: Bert Gangl

(1998)

Reviewed by Bert Gangl

Discogs TIDAL Amazon Music Spotify YouTube Music

Label Rustproof RecordsThe LighthouseUnsorted 1998

alternative rock pop rock power pop

The first strains of Send The Beggar's self-titled debut offer the listener great hope for the rest of the album. "Tangled With The Error," the album's up-tempo opener, shoots out of the gate with a wall-of-sound guitar texture riding atop a boogie-style drum beat in a song lamenting God's seeming indifference to man's prayers. "Tangled" is followed by "Tuesday Afternoon," a peppy pop gem with a clean sounding guitar intro that segues into a fuzzy, distorted tone before the song is finished. "When We're Gone," a Beatles-esque tune uses lilting guitar work atop a crisp drum sound to render a fairly straightforward reading of Psalm 90.

From that point on, however, the results are mixed. In more than one place, overly distorted and dissonant guitar work, like that on "Rome Is Sinking" and "All I Know," tends to detract from the overall song texture and make the songs themselves seem directionless. Matt Bentley's vocal work seems nearly atonal at various points on the album as well. Songs like "Head First, Face Down" or the ethereal "Winding Roads," with its echoed and heavily delayed guitar texture, end up being sandbagged by their directionless vocal attack.

Lyrically, the album uses a fairly straightforward, unembellished style to address what most would consider as fairly standard Christian themes. "Rome Is Sinking," for example, deals with hypocrisy, while "All I Know" chronicles a believer's lost passion for Christ, and "Matter" addresses the relevance of Christianity today. Such a direct style will no doubt appeal to many, especially when coupled with long-familiar themes such as the story of the wayward son in "Prodigal." On the other hand, listeners who appreciate a more clever or subtle form of lyrical presentation, a la Charlie Peacock or The Waiting, will probably be disappointed with such a fundamental lyrical approach.

All said and done, the band's forté seems to be the pure power pop numbers. These songs, with their straight-ahead vocal delivery and no-nonsense chord progressions seem to fit Bentley's vocal form and the group's lyrical style to a T. And such a song selection would indeed render the vocal and musical limitations of the majority of the harder-edged numbers nothing more than a moot point.