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Review: 'DURHAM, LINCOLN'
'The Shovel [vs] The Howling Bones'   

-  Label: 'Raybourn Publishing'
-  Genre: 'Blues' -  Release Date: '30th January 2012'-  Catalogue No: '00TSVTHB-12'

Our Rating:
This is a debut album of such astonishing assurance that you are tempted to wonder if Lincoln Durham from Austin, Texas is nothing more than a good mimic of the blues-roots style.

But what separates the wheat from the chaff in this genre is authenticity and this young man has it in spades.

His rasping growl perfectly evokes a parched and lonesome drifter facing another dusty highway."It is my agony put into words and music", he says and when you hear the passion he pours into these eleven songs you'd be a fool to doubt him.

In Reckoning Lament, Durham name checks Robert Johnson and Fred McDowell and plays slide guitar to die for. This may be old school revivalism but his strength is that he instinctively knows how the tap into power and energy of the devil's music.

Despite his relative youth, he sounds like a wise old bluesman when he sings: "To forget your past is to lose yourself".(Love Letters).

The album incorporates the four tracks from his eponymous ep from 2010 - Living This Hard, Georgia Lee, How Does The Crow Fly and Reckoning Lament.

All of these are essentially just Durham on Gibson guitar and Rick Richards on drums. Producers Ray Wylie Hubbard and George Rieff have wisely decided to keep this raw, no frills formula for the newer songs.

It is no wonder that Hubbard has pronounced Durham as "the real deal" and I for one wouldn't argue with him.

Lincoln Durham's Website
  author: Martin Raybould

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DURHAM, LINCOLN - The Shovel [vs] The Howling Bones