http://www.rootshighway.it/recensioni/2021/holcombe.htm
Malcolm Holcombe
Tricks of the Trade
[Need To Know Music 2021]
On the network: malcolmholcombe.com
Under Files: folksingers & hobos
by Matteo Fratti (13/09/2021)
He returns to the stage with these thirteen tracks (twelve plus one bonus) a nocturnal animal as Malcolm Holcombe, an artist who was stolen from the street and came to prominence not so young, despite production already started in the late 1990s. A North Carolina and Nashville native to make ends meet, a life on the fringes will be able to put into practice what would otherwise be just dark, finding himself in that hobo figure of folk, saved by music and what we can find in it. A sincere formula and not just the cliché of the cursed poet, borrowed in the song. And in one of the musical epicenters baptized as the capital of the country, he will be able to be noticed, learning the "tricks of the trade" in the field: those Tricks of the Trade named his last record.
So here he is in this last season of 2021 of silence and musical strangulation, which does not yet fully recover from the pandemic, where music as other sectors, especially the weakest, must reinvent destiny. With his acoustic guitar and tar vocals, Malcolm Holcombe combines more than a dozen pieces into his signature style, a blend of country and bluesy coarseness, for a roots album that seems to be taking straight away, where he is not alone, but enjoys the best songs to accompany him. Dave Roe on bass and Jared Tyler on guitars are with him and Jerry Roe, Dave's son, is on drums; Other instrumental interventions were added, with choruses by Mary Gauthier or Jaimee Harris embellishing the ballads: There are intense cavalcades in which there seems to be always a vision of hope behind the melancholy, which is the most common trait.
The listening, however, seems to be increasingly inflated by this formula, which makes us appreciate every single track in itself, but makes the album sometimes repetitive in its expressive mode, which we then select just a few songs. And we point out how Money Train in the opening, for example, departs from the lot, a very appreciable invitation to travel and in its own right almost a piece of the best Tom Waits; Misery Loves Company follows instead is sunny and roadway, towards a horizon we imagine at dawn instead of, from the third, towards sunset. Because "Into the Sunlight" (to the detriment of the title) and "Your Kin" (which seems to be played with the mold), as well as "Good Intentions" or "On Tennessee Land" belong to those "cavalcades" that were said, enjoyable in themselves but repetitive in the whole. Add to our personal choice the subdued sound in odor of the boundaries of the title track; and jewelry apart from the lone arpeggio of Lenora Cynthia that precedes her: All you need to do is win over the rest. It is, however, a good return, so spontaneous and humane that it cannot be perfect.