2020

Richard Dawson turns the sprawl of modern British working life into folk-prog epics sung from inside the call center, the delivery warehouse, and the anxious commute.

"Jogging" runs on a jittery pulse of guitar and panic, a man narrating his own attempt to outrun mental collapse in real time, the tune buckling under him. Dawson's genius here is refusing the comfortable distance of protest song: on "Fulfilment Centre" the narrator is a warehouse worker whose body and morale are being rationed by the shift, and the voice cracks with the specificity of someone who has actually been there. Nothing is generalized into slogan; every song wears a name tag and a lanyard. That insistence on the particular is what makes the record ache rather than lecture.