Northern Exposure...

Malcolm Holcombe looks like a re-animated corpse, lumbering around the stage and singing in a funny voice. At extreme stage left stands a little table on which he has placed a cup of cold coffee. He pauses to sip from the cup as it becomes obvious his vocal mic won’t work without some coaxing from the Black Box’s sound engineer.

Behind the mic is a chair, but rather than sit on it he bends his head at a disjointed and extremely unlikely angle to address the crowd. Rocking back and forward in an exaggerated fashion he closes his eyes, strumming and warbling in a state approaching a trance. The gig is going brilliantly and he hasn’t properly started a song yet.
He’s been compared to Tom Waits, but where Waits’ raspy vocals and onstage bumbling are theatrical, Malcolm Holcombe’s serve another purpose entirely. He is delivering little mantras to keep out the demons, to hold the audience at arm’s length. Because if he did hug them he would probably smother them like the cat whose eyes he once put out with a pencil. Except, of course, that’s just one of the stories he likes to share. In reality he wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Gig-going in Belfast, it has to be said, does have its merits. At a fiver a ticket, the experience is extremely recession-friendly. And while the Black Box sports a fully functioning bar, patrons have clearly come to listen to the performer and not merely to neck a few beers while some irritating person with a guitar disturbs their chatter. Outside in the cafe a singer-songwriter gets an equally attentive listen, as does the support act. What’s not to like about it?
Although she’s a regular enough visitor to this island, Kimmie Rhodes’ latest trip is of the ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ variety. She’s stopping off on her way back from a short UK tour and a turn at the Celtic Connections festival in Scotland. She’s fitting in two performances, the first on Saturday January 30 in Sligo’s Hawk’s Well Theatre, followed by a cross-country dash to play Portstewart’s Flowerfield Arts Centre the following evening. She’s one of the most prolific writers out there and, as well as collaborating with our own Kieran Goss and Brendan Murphy, she has also clocked up co-writes with such luminaries as Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris. So expect something special as she promotes latest album, Walls Fall Down.
I have an apology to make. Sometime towards the end of last year someone at a gig somewhere gave me something, Vague enough for you? Well, people are giving me things all the time. On this particular occasion it was a little brown cardboard packet containing a CD. I added it to my ever-expanding ‘must listen to this if I ever break my back’ pile. There it would very likely have stayed had Vic Chesnutt not passed away tragically over Christmas.
For, reaching into my pile for what I assumed was Chesnutt’s Skitter On Take Off, I found I had pulled out the Drunken Boat’s Plumb The Depths CD instead. Folk music in Ireland tends to be quite meticulous but the Drunken Boat is trad of the “big landscape” variety.
At the wheel of this juggernaut is Brian Walsh who hails from Wicklow and writes about its landscape as his if it were his muse. Cold mountain air and the clarity of thought that the freezing cold awakes in you permeate the tracks. I’d love to see what they could come up with given a broader spectrum of sounds. As things stand, I’m very glad this made it to the top of the pile. Maybe the ghost of Vic Chesnutt, no stranger to the dirty epic himself, guided my hand.
Another band of newcomers I am happy to recommend are The Ginger Envelope. The Athens, Georgia outfit is centred around vocalist Patrick Carey and pedal-steel player Matt Stoessel who has worked with Cento-matic and South San Gabriel, two of my favourite groups. Lyrically they can be obscure but Carey’s hazy, slightly androgynous voice (it’s been compared to Dylan but I don’t hear it ) sweeps you effortlessly away. There is a playfulness to what they do, most evident perhaps on their cover of Loudon Wainwright’s ‘Swimming Song’ where the poetry that hallmarks Carey’s own writing is exchanged for the effervescence of Wainwright’s end -of-summer dreaminess.