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Lincoln - "Repair and Reward" | Album Review

by Benji Heywood (@BenjiHeywood)

In his book The Condition of Postmodernity, political economist David Harvey argues that compressions in the way we experience space-time generate corresponding changes in culture. However, in postmodernity, our experience of space-time is so compressed, culture is collapsing in on itself. The whole system of how we understand our world has been destabilized, to the point where we can no longer decipher what is true and what has meaning. If this rings true, it’s especially eerie to consider Harvey wrote the book in 1992, pre-The Internet as we’ve come to experience it. Either the dude is Nostradamus, or his theory holds water. 

Kicking off in 2004 with the reformation of the Pixies – only a couple years after the internet became part of most non-boomers’ daily lives – we’ve basked in a perpetual resurrection of bands. Imagine telling me, in 2000, a distraught emo kid who never got to see American Football, Drive Like Jehu, Slint, et.al., that I’d see all these bands (and countless others) years later and have the chance to pick up their discography on remastered reissued vinyl, to boot? I’d have called you crazy, but I’m not Dave Harvey.

Nor do I run Temporary Residence, the label that recently reissued early 90s post-hardcore/emo band Lincoln’s entire discography, long out of print, as one reconstructed album entitled Repair and Reward. Quick history lesson: Lincoln was a band from West Virginia who, despite being together for less than a couple years, had an outsized influence on the scene. Repair and Reward aims to lengthen this influence on a whole new generation of people who like their guitar music earnest and loud. 

What’s fascinating about this album is that Repair and Reward is both a new release and a reissue simultaneously. The collection works as an album, thanks in part to the legwork of J. Robbins (more on him in a minute) but also serves as an artifact from an earlier time, making it the landmark reissue project of the era. Masterfully restored and remixed from recently recovered analogue tapes by J. Robbins (Jawbox founder and producer of countless other capital I important emo albums), Repair and Reward combines all three of Lincoln’s 7-inches plus an unreleased track to form a unique non-chronological track listing. In a down year for the genre, a band last active three decades ago has released the best emo album of the year. 

Repair and Reward does just that – repairs a gap in our collective music knowledge, then rewards us with tracks like “Benchwarmer.” “Benchwarmer” features all the hallmarks of early post-hardcore/emo: dueling guitars, frenetic drumming, melodic bass playing, and sung-screamed vocals, to head-bobbing effect. Think late 80s Fugazi or fIREHOSE but played with the utter abandon of teenagers. It’s a vibe repeated across the album’s eight tracks. “Grade Curve” sounds like it is dripping in sweat. “Seed,” with its berserker drumming, palm-muted guitar, and massive halftime breakdown, is closer to straight-up hardcore than emo, proving how amorphous early music from the genre was. Album highlight “Waterboy” sounds like an improvised jam performed at The Dry House – Morgantown, WV’s lone all ages venue frequented by the members of Lincoln – that happened to be captured to tape. 

J. Robbins’ work here is remarkable. Many early post-hardcore and emo albums are borderline unlistenable now. Under Robbins’ expertise, the sound of Repair and Reward is rich and clear while still representative of the era. Guitars and snare drums cut, the bass is balanced, and the vocals are slightly tucked, as if Jay Demko’s voice were in a fist fight with drummer Justin Wierbonski’s cymbals.  What’s fun about a song like “Waterboy” is how clear Lincoln’s influence on J. Robbins’ own band Jawbox was. This is true about the entire album. Lincoln provide a necessary link between the proto-emo of Rites of Spring and the post-hardcore-tinged emo of the mid 90s, where bands like Hoover and Jawbox took Lincoln’s blueprint and ran with it. As such, Repair and Reward is a love letter not just from Robbins to the band, but to all of us 90s emo kids who pine for the glory years of music that sounded more like Lincoln than Hot Topic. 

It’s incredible when you think about it: Lincoln – a tiny band from Morgantown, West Virginia who formed and broke up quicker than the lifespan of most high school crushes – has reentered the public zeitgeist. It’s well-deserved. Repair and Reward is a triumphant listen, especially for us older cats who listen and marvel at how uniquely timeless yet still nostalgic the whole project is. If Lincoln isn’t proof of postmodernism’s collapse of time and space, then I’m super excited to see what Temporary Residence reissues next.