A noticeable structural quality of the tracks on The Ruby Cord, is how the lone voice at the beginning becomes collective and choral by the end. The Hermit sets this musical template. What's the song about? Well the lyrics, like the music, have a similar cast to them, an opaque elliptical evasive quality. They appear to be taking you on a walk, a close almost microscopic inspection of the natural world. The character of The Hermit, is living on the fringes of society, not necessarily by choice. With a feeling that the hermit is alienated from these things he is looking at. Is this rustic experience then, a real or a virtual one?
The Ruby Cord, is the final part of a Trilogy. The Peasant gave you the past, as if viewed from a medievalist perspective. 2020 presented a cogent sense of the current state of the nation. The Hermit shows you a post apocalyptic folk infused picture of the future. Its as though the first album The Peasant is now being seen through a gaming console, a landscape explored through headphones and a plasma screen A world entirely seen through the internet turns everyone into a hermit. The Hermit ends on a sad plangent note, with a slow waltzing choral lament of:-
Tiny cobbles out at sea
Black wall of cloud in the east
And a taper of a rainbow
Faintly aglow
Amidst their wakes
That Dawson released The Hermit as a single is a bit of a statement of intent, in itself. He is not set on fame or riches, but on continuing to plough his own erratic, particular furrow. The rest of the album, continues in the same vein. Thicker than Water has the protagonist looking to his lost family, to find the house where is Mam and Dad used to live. The Fool, that follows, has a wonderful musically rambunctious quality to it as it ambles along. A man is in love. A love that is perhaps not reciprocated or is not going to be long lasting. Yet he carries it with him like a backpack, nonetheless. Holding out for love in a world that has grown loveless.
Museum, invites you into a this civic institution for an now extinct humanity.
Miles of hard corridors,
Dazzling with projected people
Bound in loops of light forevermore
Ending on a proud electronic thrum of a march that the chorus hum along to. The Tip of an Arrow continues exploring the boundary between virtual and real worlds of knowledge.
That in a world such as today's
Where each person can display
A bounty of data
On the quivering cave wall of their eyeball
At the merest flick of a lash
The only facts of any worth
Are not so easily dispersed
Yes, it matters how we learn
Real knowledge must be earned
Everything else is a husk
Wisdom's simulacrum
No-one, is a short hail of crackling static, wind sounds processed through an electronic radio filter, bells ringing, comes then goes. The album concludes with a gently rocking folk melody Horse & Rider as two dislocated folk leave their old life, not clinging on to a world that has now crumbled.
I wonder if my lady knows there is no way back
To the world from which she was born
And the only way out is forward and down
Along weed burst motorways we tear
Past the tangled silence of our emptied cities
Over unseen churning seas we go
Never ending passage through the cold and dark.
Though this may sound bleak, it has an uplifting, even hopeful lilt to it, that something will come of leaving behind the remnants of a civilisation that no longer works.
As I more closely listen to this album it weaves a much stronger experience than you hear at first. It hasn't the grunge and contemporary punchiness of 2020, but paints with kindness a dissolute realm where the best way to survive is to stride off into the wilderness outside the urban dystopia. The Ruby Cord is proving to be a quiet but fabulous thing of depth and engagement.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
No comments:
Post a Comment