Review of Malcolm Holcombe’s performance
at Dave’s Aqua Lounge, January 20, 2011

By Barry Moses

Arlo Guthrie said songwriting is like catching fish, and Bob Dylan’s upstream, gettin’ the best ones.

Malcolm Holcombe ain’t far downstream.

Some songs seem to have come through him, others probably came knocking and he let them in and dressed them up for success. Still others he must have just plain made up, and a few he’s drawn from public domain and customized via the folk process.

Like Dylan, Holcombe is adept at lyrics that narrate from uncommon vantage points and expose arcane, rather than surface, facets of a story. Such songs are not Holcombe’s only suit, though: he employed several genres–ballad, blues, bluegrass, rock, and standard at Dave’s Aqua Lounge, St. Petersburg, FL, on January 20, 2011.

I sat with eight friends. Steve Vaclavik opened with his band, The Woeful Ones. Steve advised the crowd that Malcolm would be up at 9:00 p.m., and with just one guitar “would kick their asses.”

That was my first inkling of how good Malcolm is.

Some of Malcolm’s stage patter evokes the undiagnosed, untreated characters you might meet on the Lost Highway; however, for the most part, his patter is passing normal.

When Malcolm sings, he’s seeing the eternity of what his music and lyrics release in measures. My friend Kathryn commented that he seemed drained at the end of each song and that, for an instant, there’d be nothing in his piercing blue eyes.

He played non-stop and held a multi-generational audience’s attention for over two hours, pausing only once for a couple of drags on a cigarette.

You can visit Malcolm’s website here, and his label’s website here.

He has five CDs out. “For the Mission-Baby” and “How to Drink the Rain” are the two most recent.

All five are worth getting.