https://rockingmagpie.wordpress.com/2023/06/16/malcolm-holcombe-bits-pieces/
Malcolm Holcombe BITS & PIECES
Malcolm Holcombe
Bits & Pieces
Self-Release
Old Testament Songs About Folks Getting By on The Mercy of Faith, and Trying To Make Sense of a World That No One Truly Understands.
Bits & Pieces is Holcombe’s 18th album, recorded not long after a long and tiring cancer recovery, and he comes out swinging, reckless and daring right from the first song.
Long time Holcombe collaborator Jared Tyler produced this album, along with Brian Brinkerhoff, and Tyler also played all the other instruments—drums, percussion, various stringed instruments including classical guitar, dobro, lap steel, electric guitar, bass, mandola, and sang backup.
The perfect foil for Holcombe’s songs, Tyler keeps it smart and simple, making these songs sound as if they crawled right out of the swamp—murky, bold, teeming.
Oft times the instruments strike with such force they seem to merge into one, hitting the pure melodies of Holcombe’s songs the way old Bluesmen would play together.
Holcombe hard plucks his songs as if his life depends on it.
If he’s going to play these songs, you’re going to hear them, he’s righteously determined about that, and with a life-ravaged voice, he growls and snarls right through these tunes.
If Holcombe was a wolf caught in a trap, you get the feeling he’d have no problem gnawing off his own paw to be free, and these songs are proof.
I wonder just who some of these songs are about. The narrator in the title track seems weary, caught up short, he’s had a hard scrabble life, yet he’s nowhere ready for atonement.
“This is my life and I may not be worthy,
but I’m here, so deal with it,” he seems to say.
“Happy Wonderland” is full of life advice such as:
“You gotta butter your bread on the right side
Don’t whistle at the women ’round here
That corn fed bible belt mama’s
gotta skillet made for your head,”
and you get the feeling that Holcombe is speaking from experience!
“Fill Those Shoes” is a country plea for salvation, a crooked path of a love song, with a gold foil of a melody:
“I’ve seen lives torn apart I’ve been there,
still coming to
Now I believe you’re the only one
To fill those worn out shoes”
“This time’ll be different,
this time it wont hurt,”
he says in “The Wind Doesn’t Know You,” while the guitars and snare drum merge like knife thrusts and Holcombe’s ragged voice intones triumphantly, as if to convince himself of the truth of the words.
After listening to this collection of songs for the seventh time—these songs don’t hit you all at once, like a ton of bricks, they’re much slyer; like good whiskey, seeping into your brain, you go to stand and you stumble from the sudden unexpected headiness—I get the feeling that Holcombe and the writer Harry Crews would get along just fine, swapping tales of men lost in the Old Testament, folks getting by on the mercy of faith, people trying their level best to make sense of a world that no one truly understands.
Bits & Pieces would make a glorious backdrop to a reading of Crews’ 1978 memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, and I may just have to do that.
Review by Roy Peak
Released June 23rd 2023
https://www.malcolmholcombe.com/
