Peasant

"Album of the week" - "Captain Beefheart, Derek Bailey: these are names redolent of difficult listening, and, at its most splintered-sounding, Peasant is occasionally hard work, albeit rewarding ... 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".

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"Dawson might borrow from and work within many of the aesthetics of the British - well, Celtic - folk tradition, with some bluesy inflections and a consistent gaze towards the shadowy vistas of experimental rock and noise music, there's little that's genuinely "traditional" about his work at all. His songs are not adaptations of troubadour classics, nor are they the ramshackle '60s-pop-tunes-disguised-in-Fairport-Convention-costumes that apparently pass for folk music post-Mumford. They're weirder, wider in scope, infinitely more profound than that. They always have been, and, on Peasant, are perhaps more so than ever before ... Its significance, its profundity, its sheer exhilarating force will stay with you for far longer than just about anything else you're likely to hear this year".

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