Malcolm Holcombe
Bits & Pieces
[Need to Know 2023]
On the web: malcolmholcombe.com
File Under: Misery is the river of the world
by Gianfranco Callieri (06/26/2023)
By now Malcolm Holcombe, a singer-songwriter from North Carolina, is about to turn seventy and, despite having touched, some time ago, the orbit of the record multinationals, continues to express himself in the most total and tireless regime of independence, rarely making records that include something more than his voice, his guitar and the supervision (sometimes instrumental accompaniment) of the trusty Jared Tyler. Bits & Pieces - his eighteenth album - belongs to the most iconic sphere of a career that certainly cannot be blamed for having followed the muse of a bombastic or grandiloquent style, but nevertheless bears the burning essentiality of his brutal, gaunt, metaphysical language, son of loneliness and pain, to new depths.
From the sandpaper country-blues of the first Bits And Pieces, a collection of snapshots of human suffering where the images of a drunk priest overlap with those of an insomniac devoured by rage and a homeless man with collapsing lungs, to the melodramatic indictment folk song of the latest Bring To Fly, dedicated to the "humble victims who falter and fall" before "the call of the ruins of Babylon", Holcombe sings in an increasingly flayed voice the hundreds of wounds of an existence in perpetual motion whose flow of conscience - catarrhous, labyrinthine, dominated by the obsession for physical decadence, at times torn by peaks of unexpected lyricism - assumes universal values precisely by virtue of the honesty of its dictation, the evident and indisputable osmosis between the roughness of the sounds, the words and locutions used, and the inner regions, the intimate experience of the user.
In a fairer and more parallel world, the extraordinary folk-rock of Fill Those Shoes, more or less responding to the Holcombian idea of a love song, would end up in the charts exactly as happened, thirty years ago, to the Wallflowers or Spin Doctors (try to imagine it with a less spartan arrangement and you won't be that far from the best pages of these two groups), even if making the electric gasps of The Wind Doesn't Know You digestible in the mainstream sense, the sharp blues of Conscience Of Man, the prison gospel cadences of the hallucinated Happy Wonderland (with a cocaine-drunk brothel-goer who almost finds himself killed, with frying pans, by one of the prostitutes) and the roughly bluegrass dimension of Another Sweet Deal would instead be rather complicated on any planet.