Ричард Доусон представил концептуальный альбом «Peasant» с мрачными историями о жизни в эпоху упадка Римской империи

Richard Dawson’s records are not easy listens. His nightmarish spin on British folk music has spanned six heady LPs, somewhere between John Frusciante’s whacked-out guitar work on Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt and Scott Walker’s brutal avant-garde epics on Bish Bosch. Dawson’s last album, 2014’s Nothing Important, consisted of two lengthy compositions bookended by two noisy instrumentals. While his guitar playing is a fascinating thing—precise and chaotic, strings plucked with a dangerous physicality—the real power of the album was in Dawson’s writing. The title track seamlessly slipped between autobiography and eulogy, and “The Vile Stuff” wrung apocalyptic drama from a drunken adolescent field trip. These were songs designed to be scoured for meaning, with enough plot development and cosmic payoff to earn spoiler alerts. If he would have included more than two of them on the album, it would have been impenetrable. On Peasant, Dawson refines that album’s scope into his most accessible and elusive music to date, focussing on more conventional song structures while further developing his voice as a storyteller. According to Dawson, Peasant is a concept album, taking place “somewhere between [the years] 500 and 700, after the slow withdrawal of the Roman Empire from the north east.” Over 11 tracks that are mostly named after the profession of their narrators, Peasant presents the most primal and hideous aspects of the distant past. There are “houses cast with clay and sheepdung”; there are “pummelled gall-nuts afloat in urine.” There are miscreants, malingerers, dastards, and knaves. In “Weaver,” the narrator notices a crab caught in a woman’s hair as he holds a newborn baby, “still dangling from a string.” Discussing his medieval inspiration, Dawson has said, “Certainly, I don’t have an interest in writing a ‘Game of Thrones’ album,” and he’s succeeded in avoiding that categorization. The images here are far too graphic to appear on HBO. No score yet, be the first to add. Yet this is also the most beautiful music Dawson has ever recorded. The arrangements are period-appropriate, all Renaissance Faire flutes and choirs chanting in unison like an angry mob. The production is both visceral and lush, its gentle instrumentation punctuated with jarring bursts of percussion and horns. In “Soldier,” Dawson plays acoustic guitar with a deft musicality, akin to Dave Longstreth’s knotty riffs in Bitte Orca’s “Temecula Sunrise.” As the melody evolves into something smoother and simpler, Dawson’s lyrics also find a sense of peace. On an album that features enough archaic diction to warrant a glossary, “Soldier”’s plainspoken lyrics are its most effective ones. It’s heartbreaking when Dawson simplifies the narrator’s anxiety into an artless phrase: “I’m really scared of going.” It’s equally stirring when, upon imagining a future with his family, Dawson bellows the closing lyric, “My heart is full of hope,” his voice rising to a triumphant howl. Dawson grows as a singer throughout these songs, sometimes with humorous results. He finds his lowest reaches in the chorus of “Weaver” and strains for his highest falsetto in “Beggar.” Right before the rousing finale of “Ogre,” he stretches out the syllables of the word “morning,” groaning in pain like a goose kicked in the gut. Other moments illustrate how pleasant a musician Dawson has become. The sprightly melody in “Beggar” is downright gorgeous, accompanying a tragic story of a homeless man and his beloved collie. But Dawson knows when his music approaches anything resembling convention; he twists his compositions into gruesome shapes at the exact moment you start getting comfortable. This quality helps maintain Peasant’s masterful pace and keeps things invigorating when his tales of toadsong and dogshide start erring on the side of parody. In a deeply moving track called “Prostitute,” the titular character ponders her existence and dreams of a better life for her hypothetical children. It ends with her standing over a man as he chokes on vomit, when she decides to steal his horse and flee “this country of demons made flesh.” Like all of Dawson’s best work, there’s a glint of horror to it (are these demons literal or figurative?) and a shocking sense of real-world application. “It’s hard to explain, but it happens again and again,” Dawson sings, hinting that these songs are as much ancient archetypes as they are modern cautionary tales. In moments like these, Peasant becomes a breakthrough for Dawson: an overwhelming, vulgar, and deeply rewarding record. His only limitation is the world he lives in. Here, he begins to transcend it.