Reviews of The Big Time

You meet Holcomb's songs on their own terms or you don't meet them at all.  On her first record in six years, this reclusive singer-songwriter retains her work's odd structure, enigmatic lyrics, and coolish demeanor, all of which will endear her to fans.  Holcomb's quivering vocals, plain-spoken piano work, and shrewd inclusion of evocative instrumental textures (by Wayne Horvitz, Bill Frisell and others) bring additional depth to already absorbing material.
Entertainment Weekly, July 12, 2002

It's one thing to occupy a unique musical niche where genre-defining walls first meet, then crumble into fine powdery dust.  But on The Big Time (her fourth album for Nonesuch and sixth since 1989's mostly instrumental Larks, They Crazy,) Robin Holcomb also seduces the listener into feeling right at home - a place where she juggles her gifts as a Georgia-born, UC Santa Cruz-educated modern classical pianist and composer with her affinity for old American folk music, Randy Newman, The Band, Stephen Foster, Indonesian gamelan, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. She weds poetic images (shadows flying away, voices drifting in from the edge of the world) and intriguing directives ("Pretend you remember more than you do"; "You'll crave confusion more than you know") to short, low-flying melodies and invites you to experience her world of emotional self-examination as your own.  Although Holcomb's superficially fragile and quavering voice seems like it could dry up and blow away in the slightest wind of change, it ultimately reveals the same wise resilience that informs her eccentric, original love songs and her covers of the A.P. Carter ballads A Lazy Farmer Boy and Engine 143.  Zony Mash (organist Wayne Horvitz, guitarist Timothy Young, bassist Keith Lowe and drummer Andy Roth) provide the core accompaniment, with guitarist Bill Frisell contributing some of his edgiest recent playing.  A host of guests (including Kate and Anna McGarrigle) add textures that restore meaning to exhausted adjectives such as "mysterious" and "dreamlike," to the point where you might consider Holcomb as Joni Mitchell's postmodern Appalachian jazz-pop Wiccan twin.
San Francisco Bay Guardian, July 24, 2002

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