Peasant
No listener to Dawson’s earlier music has ever discerned a lack of artistic ambition. Whether they got on at the last stop - the 4 track Tyneside-Trout-Mask-through a-Vic and Bob-filter of Nothing Important - or earlier in the journey, with The Glass Trunk’s visceral song cycle or The Magic Bridge’s sombre revels, devotees of his earlier recordings will be at once intrigued by and slightly fearful of the prospect of a record that could make those three landmark releases look like formative work. Peasant is that album. From its first beguilingly muted fanfare to its spectacular climax exploring a Dark Ages masseuse’s dangerous fascination with a mysterious artefact called the Pin of Quib, Peasant will grab newcomers to Richard Dawson’s work by the scruff of the neck and refuse to let them go until they have signed a pledge of life-long allegiance.
Newcastle singer-songwriter Richard Dawson twists his compositions into gruesome shapes at the exact moment you start to get comfortable—but Peasant contains his most accessible music to date.
Richard Dawson further demonstrates his unique songwriting power on his most ambitious, devastating album to date.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Richard Dawson has devoted his talents to conjuring a vision of an old, weird England, one that his nation's folk tradition is just not strange enough to match.
Richard Dawson's medieval LP ‘Peasant’ is a potent and mournfully beautiful meditation on humankind’s inability to fix itself.
A concept album set in medieval north Britain shouldn’t work. But Dawson’s way with lyrics and melodies makes it unique and often breathtaking