Misfortune teller
Sixth studio LP from the talismanic Newcastle bard peers into a glum near-future. By Andrew Male.
Richard Dawson ★★★ 2020 WEIRD WORLD/DOMINO. CD/DL/LP
IN A career that began with self-publicised copies of his first two LPs, 2005’s Sings Songs And Plays Guitar and 2011’s dazzling The Magic Bridge, Richard Dawson developed a unique signature style, ragged Northumberland
folk hymnals sung in a windblown falsetto of fear and portent, and caught on a rusted wire fence of deconstructed guitar.
Located in a hazy netherworld, somewhere between the personal and the abstract, Dawson’s songs could haunt, unsettle and nettle, in equal measure. Unique and beguiling, it’s a sound he might have settled into easily, but artistic ambition is everything with him.
Following his 2014 Weird World/Domino debut, the visionary and grandiose four-track personal odyssey Nothing Important, came 2017’s Peasant, a Middle Ages prog folk song cycle chronicling the lives of inhabitants of the Bryneich kingdom in the Old North.
With its feet stood firmly in the mire of the ancients, Peasant proved to be Dawson’s finest work to date, graphic medieval tales of hardship and death delivered with the cautionary force and stark power of an Alan Garner novel.
For 2020, Dawson swaps yesterday for tomorrow and a similarly ambitious concept album about the looming year in prospect, setting aside the phantasmal and archaic for a Ken Loach social realism.
Recorded at Blank Studio in Newcastle with Sam Grant of Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, the sound is documentary-sharp, and album opener Civil Servant glares like fluorescent strip-lighting in a call-centre kitchen. A jagged reel about the daily 9-to-5 drudge, it’s sonically inventive, with vocoder interludes and a rousing final call of “Refuse! Refuse!”, but its on-the-nose swipes at “Busfulls of meat…staring at phone-screens” can’t avoid the patronising tone of 95 per cent of all songs about “the workers”, written by those otherwise employed.
There are similar problems with the jittering 10-minute odyssey of Fulfilment Centre in which Dawson imagines himself a broken Amazon slave-packing “power tools, tablets and football shirts” and “pee[ing] in a bottle” while a robot voice urges “increase productivity!”
Far better are songs where Dawson locates the misery and mystery of life in smaller worlds and stranger vignettes, like recent rousing single Jogging, in which a PTSD school councillor cures his anxiety with a daily park run, or the sweetly melancholy Two Halves (a young lad and his dad are united over a Chinese meal after a disastrous school football match). Perhaps best of all is the prog-metal stop-start of Black Triangle, the tale of a UFO enthusiast that hovers eerily between prosaic defeat and cosmic revelation, and ends on an image of haunting power.
At moments like this, there is no one to
touch Richard Dawson, and you wish there were more moments like this.