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Weird World | richardmichaeldawson.bandcamp.com
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Modern folk music is such a curious genre. Where once there was no separation between performer and audience, nowadays the two are have developed healthy boundaries. Folk straddles the divide between definitions. It takes what is now optional and, through sheer and anachronistic force of will, makes it again mandatory.
The current consensus is music as entertainment: everyday art that tints the background of boring bus commutes and strenuous studying and late-night trips to the supermarket to pick up those chips you’re craving. The earliest meaning (which, depending on the context, continues to this day) is music as community-building: straightforward melodies and structures seldom more complicated than a verse-chorus loop, elucidating local values through parable or through direct statement, committed to memory, able to be reproduced by any subgroup at any time.
With one foot in the past and another in the present, tension courses through Peasant's every muscle, shivers through every nerve, and crackles through every vein.
Richard Dawson’s true instrument of choice is not the cheap nylon guitar or the screechy untuned fiddle. It is the scalpel. With surgical precision, he scoops out historicity, and packs into the hollowed-out carapace his own prickly, abrasive histories. Though he imitates the aesthetic of ancient English folk — yowling strings, makeshift percussion, heavy reliance on pedal notes and boozy singalong choruses — his sense of melody is thoroughly modern.
To call Peasant glorified taxidermy would be a disservice to Dawson’s prodigious skills. With their pebbled hooves, matted pelts and clouded eyes, his creations breathe.
This album welcomes the listener into a raucous tavern stocked only with barrels of the finest IPAs, frequented by the hipster peasantry taking a break from threshing grain or dying of smallpox to discuss the finer points of philosophy. Casting the bright technicolour angles of Dirty Projectors through the monochrome prism of the Magnetic Fields’ concussive bluntness, develops vulgar snapshots of daily life for the pre-medieval everyman.
These are not Joanna Newsom’s intimately detailed vistas, though the two share an enviable knack for weaving strong melodies within complex structures. You will find nothing remotely as lofty as her narratives of flowing skies and starlit water here — only mud and ale and filth, as lovingly spilled by one Richard Dawson. At once erudite and earthy, the Novocastrian’s ragged voice frays at the edges like a well-worn tweed blazer.
Last time on the Ramble, I dismissed The Dark Side of the Moon as hopelessly outdated — Pink Floyd’s groundbreaking instincts and idiosyncrasies were so influential that forty years later they read as tiresome cliché — and suggested that, due to artistic inflation, its once-prodigious significance is worth little in 2018’s musical economy. You can crush it in the palm of your hand. It would be irresponsible to make comparisons across decades and genres, so I’m going to do it anyway. Dawson’s sense of style refreshes, incorporating imaginative misquotations of scales, frequent modal shifts, and an endearing affection for harmonising his reedy baritone and jangly guitar in wholesome sixths. Peasant for all its artiness, remains impressively legible, and, daringly, overflows with an abundance of honest-to-God hooks.
This time I’d like to clarify a rubric, not necessary for what art is, but for what feels artsy. It must be large, either in scope, in ambition, in physical dimension, or in magnifying the small. Peasant qualifies on all four criteria. It is a Warholian travelogue of pre-medieval Britain, skilfully overlapping what any designer worth their salt can tell you are one and the same: form and function. Its thesis? That there is nothing new under the sun. People’s fears and grievances have not changed the slightest in well over a millennium.
Dawson’s spiky, hoppy folkxperimentation is not only intriguing, but deeply human.
“I am tired /
I am afraid /
My heart is full of hope”