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Pretty ballsy to release an album entitled 2020 at the tail end of 2019. Can’t wait to try finding it on search engines in a few years time. Also pretty ballsy to start that album with a discordant guitar lead that sounds something like rustic folk music from the Middle Ages if bards had access to fenders and amps. Ballsy-er still to make that first song about a disgruntled civil servant dreading going into work, struggling with the inherent cruelty of the system they exist in. Perhaps ballsy-est of all, to make me cry listening to that song. Twice.
2020 is a weird album. This is nothing new for Richard Dawson, a man whose last release, 2017’s nearly equally brilliant Peasant, was a collection of stories about medieval Northumbria, with folk instrumentals that sounded like they were recorded on instruments straight out of a museum. 2020 sees Dawson take the same core ideas behind Peasant, telling the stories of common, everyday folk, and shifting it forward some one thousand years to the present day. For anyone familiar with Dawson’s previous work (a group of people sadly all too small), 2020 is nothing radically new. The trappings of a Dawson project, his intimate, detail orientated song writing, his incredible vocal delivery that ranges from a deep Geordie growl to an effeminate, delicate falsetto, the twangy guitar he uses on almost every track, the weird synths he loves to throw in, they’re all here. His bleak worldbuilding contrasted with beautiful displays of humanity. Yet, on 2020, the final result is more accessible than ever before, both in musical terms and in relation to the content. The sound of the album lies somewhere between the rustic, epic folk of Peasant, English new wave and the more creative parts of current pop music (he lists last year’s stellar SOPHIE album as a major inspiration). This seemingly disparate group of sound all come together into the easiest on the ear Dawson has ever been. His older projects, The Magic Bridge, The Glass Trunk and Nothing Important were at times almost too dense and experimental for their own good, and Peasant, while much more musically coherent than what came before, takes time to digest content-wise, the core themes of community and heritage hiding behind a massive pile of ogres, hobgoblins and shapeshifting beggars.
2020 is much clearer than his previous efforts. The main through line of the album is almost apparent from the title alone; anxiety over the future, on both an individual and global level. The England of 2020 is bleak, and though not as bleak as the one on Peasant (no children are sold off for a years’ worth of grain) it feels almost more so due to how recognisable it is. A ‘Civil Servant’ wakes up everyday to do a job that leaves him feeling tormented over his inability to actually help people, leaving him in bed hearing “the strangled voices of all the people I’ve failed.” A similar sentiment is expressed on the 10-minute-long epic ‘Fulfilment Centre’, a very direct jab at the horrific working conditions in Amazon warehouses, with Dawson wailing how “there has to be more to life than killing yourself to survive”. ‘The Queen’s Head’, one of the most traditional folk songs here, sees a rural community devastated by a flood, with a local butcher all too eager to place the blame on a recent influx of immigrants. ‘Black Triangle’ and ‘Heart Emoji’ both focus on failed relationships, with the first showing how a UFO enthusiasts’ obsession with the extra-terrestrial pushed his wife into the arms of another man, and the second taking a murderous turn after the song’s protagonist discovers their partner’s infidelity through a midnight text on their phone. Perhaps worst of all is the closer, ‘Dead Dog in an Alleyway’, a grim tale of a homeless man getting kicked to death in the street. The world is dark, and as 2020 looms ever closer, Dawson seems to see it getting darker, as he declares on ‘Jogging’: “I feel the atmosphere ‘round here is growing nastier.”
Yet, this pessimism, this seething critique of late-stage capitalism, of Brexit Britain, the inherent loneliness of modern life, this is all only really a side product of the real effort on the album. Dawson has said in interviews how he sees his work as much more personal than political, saying in a recent interview with The Fader how he feels music which focuses on the political over the personal tends to feel shallow and “didactic”. Regardless of how you feel about that take, his work is a clear example of how perhaps foregrounding the personal can have incredible results. The dark, near dystopian England he portrays serves as a backdrop for some of the most beautiful flashes of human spirit on any record in recent years. The civil servant calls into work on a truly emphatic chorus, portraying his minor act of rebellion as revolutionary. The local community all comes together on ‘The Queen’s Head’ to save the pub, and the worker in ‘Fulfilment Centre’ ends the song by drowning out the mechanical voice giving orders to proudly assert that they’ll one day leave and run their own café. ‘Two Halves’ is almost entirely free from the dourness that hangs over the rest of the album, carrying the innocence of the young footballer it follows, with his over-eager father yelling on from sides of the empty stadium. ‘Freshers Ball’ also focuses on family, seeing a mother leave her daughter at university and struggling with loneliness afterwards. Yet, the true emotional gut punch of the album is ‘Jogging’, a song which sees Dawson describe a man struggling with anxiety with such terrifying accuracy that it’s hard to believe it doesn’t come from personal experience (it’s supposedly based on a conversation he had with a fan at a gig). The song opens with heavy, grungy guitars, which eventually give way to triumphant synths and Dawson’s angelic wail, as he describes finding solace in jogging, allowing him to shed the weight of the world he seems to carry on his shoulders. The song is inspiring in a way few are, and easily the highlight of the album, arguably the decade as a whole. For all the despair in the world, Dawson seems to have a great deal of hope in spite of it.
Following on from Peasant, it’s amazing to see the same emotional cores appear on both albums. Many tracks have similar counterparts and this leaves the two albums in a very interesting place, wherein 2020 retroactively makes Peasant more interesting. The two come to act as two halves of the same whole. On Peasant he deconstructs the mythical to find the everyday reality, whereas here he finds the mythical in that everyday reality. Perhaps it’s shallow to assume 2020 means the year, as Dawson himself has alluded in interviews that it refers to 20:20 vision. In this sense, the album is an attempt on Dawson’s part to focus in on some eternal truth, and zoomed out, external view Dawson writes from allows him to refine his image of the human soul. It is an album about the emotional core at the heart of humanity, and Dawson seems to understand that core better than anyone else. Just, please listen to it. I did, and I cried four times.
