Peasant

Peasant is a pretty staggering departure from the massed ranks of 2017’s batch of albums. It is a restorative, headstrong burst of inspiration from an artist with the courage to execute his vision without compromise. If ever an album deserved to rise above the fray, it is this one.

Peasant pulls every strand of Dawson’s work together to create something that might actually resemble accessible songwriting were it not so contorted by its own filthy humanity. It is utterly unique music, reminiscent perhaps of the complex, gnarled story-songs purveyed by Mayo Thompson and Joanna Newsom, but taken to much darker, more physical extremes.

Dawson grows as a singer throughout these songs, sometimes with humorous results.

His overgrown rustic dream, though, is oddly modern and littered with fly-tipped rubbish, with free-ranging neo-folk mini-dramas drawing parallels between imagined past and haunted present. [Aug 2017, p.103]

What these titles lack in detail, the songs themselves quickly fill with lashings of lurid prose. [Jul 2017, p.18]

At it's core, Peasant resembles a masterpiece, but this softening of the sonic edges ultimately dulls its grand impact. [Jul 2017, p.94]

Yet for all the tales of sonic Celtic carnage, Dawson’s sixth solo full-length, and second for Domino offshoot Weird World, is his most accessible to date.

The result is an album that’s out there on its own, and not merely because it’s a song cycle set in the early middle ages that doesn’t make you want to curl up and die of embarrassment. Abstruse but weirdly accessible, recherche but pertinent, Peasant is quite an achievement.

Three years in the making, Dawson’s follow-up ditches the formula entirely, transporting the listener to the AngloSaxon kingdom of Bryneich. ... The big question is how seriously to take all the antique stuff. [Jul 2017, p.50]