video review: '2020' by richard dawson

So I'm thinking I might skirt controversy by being late on this one... we'll have to see. Anyway, tomorrow seems a little overstuffed with things for me to get done, but I still do want to get this Camila Cabello review done (sigh), so stay tuned!

album review: '2020' by richard dawson

Yeah, this one has been long in coming.

Okay, some context: I first became aware of Richard Dawson in 2017 for his album Peasant, which got the sort of critical acclaim that prompted me to take a look at his back catalog - hell, at some point I'm fairly certain he was added to my schedule and I just ran out of time to cover him, because 2017 was like that. But I checked out his early albums and... well, I've always been a little uncomfortable with the term 'outsider artist', but especially on those early projects full of half-formed, ramshackle folk music with oblique lyrics and awkward singing, it did feel appropriate. And it wasn't my thing - not helped by the fact that his songs and albums ran long - but I got the impression that if things tightened up I could get into it. And going back to Peasant now, it has the feel of pastoral folk music from the middle ages run through warped contortions both in the writing and composition, taking the odd romanticism to which some treat that particular era of history and making it as realistically grotesque as possible across its fables. Which... okay, I appreciate deconstruction and satire and even this era of history, but I struggled to see what deeper point he was trying to make about that era, and despite slightly more conventional structures, I wasn't really loving the music enough to go for the deep dive.

So when his newest album 2020 was proclaimed his most accessible project to date and one moving its satire to the modern age to a lot of critical acclaim... look, I've seen a ton of people love this album and I do like some folk weirdness, so what did we get on 2020?