Richard Dawson - Peasant

If it wasn’t for Igorrr’s fantastic Savage Sinusoid, Richard Dawson’s Peasant would probably take the cake for the weirdest, quirkiest album I’ve heard this year. Not quirky the way wannabe indie twentysomethings try to seem cute with thick-framed glasses and an Of Monsters and Men t-shirt on Instagram. No, Peasant plays as though it’s alone in the woods in weather-worn leather shoes on a trip back to its dumpy shack with wood for the winter fire to keep its family from dying before 1743. The music doesn’t actually sound completely archaic though. In fact it’s pretty layered and meticulously arranged, and what sets it above so much basic bitch indie folk is its transcending of typical folk music structures and millennial clichés. While Richard Dawson isn’t the only artist taking this approach to folk music, his eccentricity on Peasant isn’t quite as much of a transparent attention cry as Devendra Banhart’s or CocoRosie’s. Richard Dawson seems to have a more focused sense of what he wants to accomplish with the music he makes than most in his field. The album starts with a horn-led (which kind I can’t put my finger on) intro track that peters out eventually into sporadic single notes that remind me of The Lonely Island’s “Sax Man”. It opens the curtains to the andante, chorus-led folk swinger “Ogre”, which is much better experienced than spoiled by description. My favorite song on the album, and one of my definite favorite songs of the year, is the unusually uplifting “Weaver”, which is anthemic in a way I can’t think of being from any other song off the top of my head, and in a way I can see plenty of metalheads appreciating. While so many shitty indie songs and Imagine Dragons try to conjure a sense of epic euphoria with overblown, often choral-sung “woah woah woahs”, the lyric-less choir-sung ending on “Weaver” captures tenfold what a most of the aforementioned type of tracks try to do. Where Peasant shines additionally uniquely is on the lyric sheet. The album consists of little vignettes portraying in specific detail the struggles of old English peasant life. In this sense the album is very classically folk, but still quite poetic (and upfront) in the language it uses and captivating in the stories it tells. I’ve never before heard a song talking about drinking goose stew/soup before it congeals. I played the album for my fiancée and read the kind of hilariously time-telling lyrics from the sleeve in a deadpan style to her to highlight their eccentricity, until I got to the song “Prostitute”, which is eventually revealed to be about a child, who eventually kills some aristocrat of some sort who comes to her and runs off with his horse…. It’s definitely a well-performed album worth sitting down with and reading along to because it’s an experience that’s unlikely to be replicated anytime soon.