Richard Dawson He sings as if he’s waging war alone against all of modern civilization. Scars have a gorgeous, well-worn beauty. Missing guitar notes and occasional vocal cracks all demonstrate intricate design and sophisticated musicianship. Bill Orcutt with the classical elegance of Joanna NewsomHis paranoid voice hums like an apocalyptic hollering from the roadside, but if you stop and listen, it’s a moving tale of filth, cruelty, and a glimmer of hope. I hear you.
Dawson has regularly rearranged his music into gnarled, chaotic forms, but over the years has gradually honed his off-kilter style into something more concise and digestible. his last two solo albums, farmers When 2020, was a twisted song cycle that chronicled the day-to-day struggles of characters living in the forgotten lower layers of society. The former transported us to the Middle Ages, following a story of a grieving beggar and a vengeful sex worker confronting the viciousness of their oppressors. The latter dates back to the present day, with the same despair confronted in the agony of an Amazon warehouse worker and his UFO conspiracy theorists. ruby codeMeanwhile, it envisions a distant future ruled by a virtual reality where big cities have begun to collapse while Dawson’s protagonist gets lost in a world of its own design. It’s a looser, more free-associative approach for Dawson, and even though he seems to have lost his way as his songs veer toward abstraction, he still retains his uniquely erratic touch. I keep holding.
If Dawson’s music had previously hinted at a sense of pro-geek scale, ruby code Launch it into towering extremes with the huge 41-minute opening track, “The Hermit.” His first 10 minutes of the song are the most compelling. Dawson and longtime producer Sam Grant create the subtle sway of his music’s flowing folk, with brushed drums, faintly strummed guitars and hissing violin strings that creak and wobble in unison. . collapse into itself. The song picks up momentum when Dawson’s voice finally enters the eleven-and-a-half minute mark, but the track never leaves this simmering mood, continuing through a cappella passages and pedal-harp-laden bridges for what seems like an eternity. hum softly as if
Of course, for Dawson, music is always only half the picture. His lyrics are what his songs come to life and this is where “The Hermit” begins to unfold. ruby codelack of concentration. Dawson’s penchant for surreal and surprising storytelling is his one of the strongest elements of his music, and his esoteric vignettes paint fragmentary portraits of humanity at its most harrowing. By comparison, “The Hermit” spends much of its runtime enforcing Dawson’s esoteric wordplay, “shafts like steam in the burgeoning sun” and “labyrinthine and labyrinthine with hedgerows.” spends describing the lush swaths of undisturbed nature inhabited by ‘patchwork meadows’. The story picks up a little momentum when Dawson’s narrator is mysteriously endowed with the ability to perceive his surroundings with unimaginable detail. But when the reality of Dawson’s world begins to collapse around him, the thread comes to naught, just as the story seems to start going somewhere else, and a vague 12-minute choral outro turns the song into something else. As hypnotizing as Headspace can possibly be, the song is, even after 41 minutes, a clear statement that Dawson still hasn’t got us anywhere. It leaves an impression.