Richard Dawson: The Ruby Cord review

I could be wrong, but the last time I listened to an album opening track that lasted for over 40 minutes, it might have been Tales from Topographic Oceans by Yes. Fast forward some decades and Richard Dawson – the Newcastle upon Tyne experimental folk songwriter and singer whose work and voice bear more than a passing resemblance to Robert Wyatt – presents lengthy conceptual themes as if they’re three-minute pop songs. They are nothing of the sort, of course, but it takes no small commitment to devote such an amount of time to a single track that is normally the length of an entire album. Dawson’s trick (and skill), however, is to present the music as a series of slowly unfolding scenes that are infiltrated by a broad range of acoustic instrumentation (throughout, the harp playing of Rhodri Davies is especially beautiful). That opening track, The Hermit, for example, is enough in itself to seriously proclaim The Ruby Cord as one of this year’s best records. “What happens if we push on a bit further?” was the repeated question during its recording. The answer is quite likely the most durable piece of extended folk/prog/avant-garde you will hear this year.

Pitched as the final part of a trilogy that started in 2017 with Peasant (the narrative themes of which were set between AD400-600) and continued with 2019′s 2020 (which concerns, among other topics, bleak contemporary working conditions and even uglier life, in general), The Ruby Cord carries the listener into the future where, so the press release informs us “social mores have mutated, ethical and physical boundaries have evaporated – a place where you no longer need to engage with anyone but yourself and your own imagination ... People construct their own world because this one is so flawed…’”If that sounds very like 2022, then perhaps Dawson is having the last laugh, but there are more than just Dystopian vibes and virtual reality scenarios shuttling back and forth here.

Of the double album’s remaining six tracks, only one is less than three minutes (No-one), while three (Museum, The Tip of an Arrow, Horse and Rider) run closer to 10 minutes. In other words, Dawson is on a mission and a half, and the results are often mesmeric. The songs contain fusions of all kinds of everything: here be intimations of early-mid 70s Virgin Records outsider acts such as the aforementioned Robert Wyatt, Henry Cow, Slapp Happy, Ivor Cutler, Kevin Coyne, and Lol Coxhill; Martin Carthy’s time-honoured English folk; Captain Beefheart’s metallic blues; Joanna Newsom’s rapturous tones; and euphoric, lights-in-the-air, chorus-heavy pop music. Wowser.