- With his plunking acoustic guitar stabs and rough balladeer vocals, Richard Dawson has become a darling of experimental folk music, taking pastoral whimsy into noisy and abrasive territory. His new record 2020 chronicles the malaise of British society with an almost forensic eye for specific detail. This, perhaps, is what explains the decision for Dawson to plug in and showcase a wider range of musical scope, including garage rock, psychedelia and post-punk. What hasn’t departed is Dawson’s strange song structure, the music and melody guided by detailed, conversational lyrics. As a result, songs dive and bomb from emotion to emotion, as minimalist guitar picking makes way for squealing synths or raging garage rock guitars. Dawson is also a distinctive vocalist, his gravelly shout occasionally giving way to startling falsetto or massed gang vocals. While the chinstrokers may gasp disapprovingly at this comparison, there is a fair degree of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis to be found as well, with Dawson’s Little England observations and the distinctly British prog chopping and changing, all of which can be found all over your old copies of Foxtrot and Selling England By The Pound.
There’s a compendium of killer lines and observations as Dawson picks out the minutiae of mundanity but there are plenty of likeable tunes to be found as well, so long as you don’t mind songs that go down paths you don’t expect. The record’s first single Jogging starts out a bit like Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill before Dawson lists a character’s career history in a manner that suggests someone having a nervous breakdown in the middle of a job interview. There are many directions the tune takes you, but all of them are interesting and weirdly approachable. This can be said for much of the album – the savage Civil Servant delivers its missives with shapeshifting, bug-eyed rock & roll. There are instrumental passages of interest as well, such as the bleating synths at the close of Black Triangle. There is a strange Middle Eastern melody at the heart of the ten-minute Fulfilment Centre, made more unsettling with chattering vocoder voices, before it resolves itself with an almost anthemic finale where the narrator describes how one day he’ll run his own café because there’s more to life than “killing yourself to live”.
So while 2020 is far from easy listening, it retains Dawson’s DIY aesthetic, while expanding his musical palette into interesting new directions. There’s a lot to take in, but Dawson’s utterly distinct approach means you’ll never be bored.
- Matt Thrower.