In the psychotic iconography of Eye Of The Needle, with the usual fingerpicking and slide jabs framing visions of assorted hardships, or an almost old-timey I've Been There, Holcombe ends up looking more and more like Frank Stanford , "the Rimbaud of the swamps", the poet from Mississippi (who committed suicide in 1978, at the age of twenty-nine, in Arkansas) who developed a mystique of solitude that made his psychedelic, enthralling verses unique and inimitable, characterized by an indomitable melancholy. Similarly, Malcolm Holcombe of Bits & Pieces seems to be the only one to possess the formula of these Midwestern werewolf tunes, murky even when they open to a (rare) moment of joy, blatantly rural even in the parentheses in which gaining ground is a saturation of fury and tolling of six strings, disenchanted and corrosive even in the intervals in which their inexhaustible gallery of drifters, outcasts and outcasts seems to open up to let a timid ray of sunshine filter through. Which may be made of glass and iron, but seen from the perspective of Malcolm Holcombe and Bits & Pieces, it is strangely warm.