Untitled Document

15/12/2000: The gorgeous title track from Lincoln's upcoming Barcelona mini-album, a duet featuring songwriter Alex Gordon and Tracey Van Daal, is just exquisite, like The Beautiful South might sound in heaven, rather than prosaic Hull. Gordon, trumpet cocked in his belt loop, makes an unlikely gunslinger, but effortless tunes like "Crow" and the jazzy instrumental "Snake Heads" show the current rash of "15 per cent" bands (ie, the managements cut for selling clueless student combos a la Coldplay to various majors) just how to do it. One fears for them, being older and actually talented, but they really are very good indeed. STEVE JELBERT

6-12 Jan 2001: Single of the week. Lincoln 'Barcelona EP'- This stunning seven minute ballad from the impressive Londoners mixes brass, jittery keyboard noises and folk sentiments to warmly tell the tale of an ultimately sorrowful romance; then their brass section flows into a New Orleans funeral march style. Wonderfully executed , it's likely to be as memorable a song as any released this year. TIM PERRY

12/1/2001 (Friday Review - This week's album releases): Lincoln 'Barcelona EP'- This five-track mini-album indicates just how deeply the US alt-country style is penetrating British pop, which is to say, rather deeper than its incursion into contemporary American pop, I'd imagine lincoln's take on the genre is perhaps a little over intellectualized - their name, for instance, derives from the central character in a Sam Fuller movie of a Jim Thompson book - though the stately sadchore of "Barcelona" and the lap steel-sheen of the lonely-traveller lament "Hay Stack" both display the style's requisite desultory solemnity. Particularly effective is "Bullet Proof", which could have come straight out of the Will Oldham songbook, with its glum assertion that "These are not the greatest times/ only days passing by" underpinned by a poignant trumpet break and percussive detailing that recalls Tim Buckley's folk-jazz period. Their arrangements reveal an ambition akin to that of Lambchop, whose blend of country and soul is emulated through band members doubling up on horns - an approach that reaches its apogee on "Johnny Morris", where the brass assumes the melancholy of a New Orleans funeral band. "If the music seems happy to you, don't believe it," they sing, but there's an appreciation of space and depth in their music, and a delight in formal play, that speaks more loudly of joy than misery. ANDY GILL

20/7/01: Kibokin is the second mini-album in just over half a year from singular north London combo Lincoln. Not as obviously influenced by Americana sadcore as thier earlier Barcelona, these five long tracks (32 minutes in total) refine further the bands moody, brass laden sound, to the point where it comes becomes a recognisable style all their own. Lincoln use brass in a manner which owes little to either jazz or colliery bands, recalling instead the melancholy antiquity of Garth Hudson's work with The Band- and something of the stifling formality of John Adams' minimalism. It offers the perfect setting for gloomy fare like "Drowning In Flame", which borrows Charles Bukowski's evocative image to express the knotted pain of bereavement, the horns subtly shifting from mournful to hopeful as closure approaches; "Crow Song",in which foggy horns and keening electric guitar capture the apprehension of a soldier facing combat: "The mist is drifting with the moonlight/ As we fix our bayonets/ The shattered sky/ The crows are waiting/ Drawing a veil on my return"; and the mid-life crisis ruminations of "Little Mistakes". With the tracks cemented into a single continuum by found-sound interludes of radio tuning, helicopter noise and old folks' sing-song, the effect is somewhat akin to Lambchop's Thriller, and not much shorter. ANDY GILL