Richard Dawson is on fairly some inventive streak. The previous 12 months have already seen one nice album from the Tyneside bard – Henki, a collaboration with the Finnish steel alchemists Circle. Now right here’s one other: The Ruby Wire is framed because the conclusion to a trilogy of albums that Dawson started again in 2017. The primary of the three, Peasant, surveyed numerous vibrant characters residing within the Center Ages kingdom of Bryneich again circa the sixth century AD. It was adopted by 2020, which solid an empathetic eye throughout the lives of these occupying acquainted early Twenty first-century areas – the soccer subject, the native pub, the Amazon fulfilment centre. The place subsequent? To the long run, in fact – particularly 500 years into the long run, right into a kind of liminal actuality that straddles actual life and one thing extra digital.
It’s actually inside the scope of Dawson’s powers to drag off some form of neon-lit house opera. However this isn’t that album. The Ruby Wire actually has some epic qualities – for one, it’s lengthy, clocking in at an hour and 20 minutes in size, and kicking off with a gap monitor, “The Hermit”, that itself stretches out to a panoramic 40 minutes. However the place 2020 felt direct and upfront, each in its music and within the method of its storytelling, The Ruby Wire feels extra cryptic, dense and complicated, as if Dawson – by no means not formidable in his artwork – is deliberately elevating the stakes.
There may be some feat of imaginative creation occurring right here, and it’s solely by scrutinising the lyric sheet that you could actually start to understand the form of the world that Dawson has designed. The Ruby Wire is ready in an augmented actuality, people present someplace between the world we all know and a digital house by which the strains between historical past, mythology and creativeness blur. On “The Hermit”, the acquainted intermingles with the deeply unusual. One minute Dawson is sketching a bucolic scene of “crow-pocked copses” and a “caterpillar’s ardent mandibles”; the subsequent he’s singing of “an replace to my visible and ontoceptual cortexes”. “Museum”, in the meantime, follows an unnamed customer as they discover a posh that comprises an archive of human reminiscence, projected onto the partitions. One reference level for The Ruby Wire’s storytelling may be science fiction – suppose the wealthy and detailed world-building of a determine like Ursula Le Guin or Philip Okay Dick. One other may be video video games – fantasy RPGs like Skyrim that dispense little nuggets of lore as you discover, supplying you with a way of a wider world past your instant expertise.
The narratives right here may be darkish and discomfiting, however the temper is usually calm and tranquil, largely missing the roar and churn we hear in a lot of Dawson’s work. He’s backed by a mini-ensemble consisting of harpist Rhodri Davies, violinist Angharad Davies and drummer Andrew Cheetham. On “The Hermit”, they sprawl out in improvisatory style, extra involved with mellifluous texturing than acquainted tune construction. Deeper into the album, there are moments that elevate the temperature a few notches: the wild harp freakouts buried within the midst of “The Idiot”; the romping steel riff that briefly flowers on the coronary heart of “The Tip Of An Arrow”. However these are typically used as a kind of dramatic punctuation, and consequently are pretty short-lived.
No matter Dawson is writing about, he tends to return to human tales – our ambitions, fears, disappointments and frailties. You get the sensation that he’s contrived the setting of The Ruby Wire as a method of tackling such a theme from quite a lot of uncommon vantage factors. “Thicker Than Water” is a delicate canter of chiming guitars and little thrives of harp, but it surely holds a way of horrible absence at its core; the narrator, fleeing from our on-line world again into the actual world, passes by means of abandoned cities and empty twin carriageways, searching for the our bodies that he and his household way back left behind. “The Idiot” appears to hark again to the territory of Peasant, a love affair performed in a medieval city – or presumably the simulation of 1? – that ends with an enigmatic fizzle. The exceptional “The Tip Of An Arrow”, in the meantime, has the texture of a online game quest, the narrator and her plucky daughter Isagog crafting arrows earlier than venturing “into the realm of the fabled three-faced hare”. There, we’re reminded that pleasure comes earlier than a fall.
Dawson’s work has at all times required a certain quantity of buy-in from the listener, which it historically pays again with dividends. The Ruby Wire isn’t any completely different, and in its depth and ambition could go additional than any of his information earlier than. If Dawson’s discography was the books of Tolkien, this wouldn’t be The Hobbit, and even Lord Of The Rings, however The Silmarillion. As such, this won’t be the primary Richard Dawson document you’ll advocate to a newcomer: an excessive amount of, too quickly. Nonetheless, should you’ve acquired the measure of him and his work, The Ruby Wire gained’t fail to impress. You allow it thoughts reeling, fortunately baffled, dazzled by the scope of its achievement.
