Description
Label Review.
2019 album also available on CD.
Our Overview.
The bard of Newcastle, singer-songwriter Richard Dawson’s records always challenge the listener. His spin on British folk has spanned 6 solo albums, each delightfully unique with a heady mix of Richards own brand of shambolic psych-folk and experimental rock. And now the black humoured musician returns to release his sixth solo album ‘2020’, his first since the critically acclaimed, ‘Peasant’.‘2020’ is an utterlycontemporary state-of-the-nation study, that uncovers a tumultuous and bleak time.
Here is an island country in a state of flux; a society on the edge of mental meltdown. On 2020, dawson introduces us to grand themes through small lives. His are portraits of human beings struggling with recognisable (and dare we say it, relatable) concerns, conflicts and desires, each reminding us that tragedy and gallows humour are not mutually exclusive, and that the magical can sit next to the mundane. Lyrically it is by far dawson’s hardest-hitting and unflinchingly honest album to date. It is his poetic masterwork. within, we find disgruntled civil servants dreaming of better days, anxiety-addled joggers listlessly searching zoopla for houses they cannot afford in their spare time, amateur footballers who think they’re lionel messi and beleaguered pub landlords battling rising floodwaters. Here is life, in all its strange and wonderful ways.
Having released the album ‘Mogic’ with his band Hen Ogledd (‘the Old North’) in 2018, Dawson decamped to Blank Studio, Newcastle with Sam Grant of Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs and recorded all the instrumentation for 2020 himself. Nuanced and challenging, the ten songs also conversely feature Dawson’s most melodic moments yet.