RIchard Dawson - The Ruby Cord

By Eli Thayer

A solitary figure trudges along a country road.

His slow, halting steps are the product of the weight of all his earthly possessions pushing down on his back. Years of wandering takes a toll on the body. Occasionally he pauses to sit, taking a moment to breathe and relax the strain on his muscles. But before long, he heaves his belongings back onto his shoulders and resumes his journey once more.

The Ruby Cord, the new album from Newcastle-based songwriter Richard Dawson, greets listeners with a picture of itinerance. The first eleven minutes of ‘The Hermit’ pass by wordlessly, a gently brushed snare drum keeping pace under Dawson’s patient, steady, and rarely harmonically settled chords.

Travel is a constant of The Ruby Cord: the hermit’s directionless, subsistence-driven meandering segues into the desperate flight and stunning scenery of ‘Thicker Than Water’. The titular character of ‘The Fool’ goes on an emotional journey of self-actualisation over the course of a season, the dual protagonists of ‘The Tip of an Arrow’ venture on a doomed quest against change, and the unnamed ‘Horse and Rider’ voyage bravely into the unknown. The motivations of these characters are rarely clear, and contextual illumination is often supplied by just one or two lines, buried in Dawson’s dense narratives. But movement provides a welcome through line, continually reminding listeners of humanity’s restless nature as they search tirelessly for hope in a world full of despair.

The Ruby Cord is the third entry in Dawson’s run of era-specific concept albums that began with 2017’s pre-medieval Peasant and continued in 2019 with the bleakly contemporary 2020. This new record is supposedly set 500 years in the future, where virtual worlds blend with reality and nothing is quite as it seems. Yet despite its science-fiction premise, The Ruby Cord inhabits spaces similar to ones Dawson has explored before. Mentions of travelling troupes, chilly village stables, a haggling innkeeper, and an old Roman villa invoke pre-modern England, but interjections of starkly digital terms such as “glitching” and “an upgrade to my visual-upon-perceptual cortexes” re-center listeners in the future. Dawson’s vision of the future is aesthetically reminiscent of the “Urth” of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, a distant future Earth in which hints of advanced technology interweave through a society that as a whole appears to have regressed from our own.

The addition of augmented reality to The Ruby Cord distinguishes its setting and fills each line with uncertainty as reality, dreams, and simulation blend together. The narrator of ‘The Hermit’ explores a largely familiar world until an augmentation to their sight abruptly floods their vision with extensive data on everything around him, organic and otherwise. Later, after seemingly mastering the apparatus, the hermit encounters a medieval knight glitched into the ground, desperately “gasping the chivalric oath” before the pressure squeezes him to death and his armour dissolves to reveal the unimpressive body of a local apprentice. ‘Thicker Than Water’, seemingly a story of escape from forced labour in search of a better life, twists when the narrator arrives at their destination: the location of their family’s (including the narrator’s own) corporeal bodies, trapped in The Matrix-like sarcophagi while their simulated selves slave away in the mines. The Ruby Cord is full of tantalising peeks into the deeper structure of its world, but listeners hoping for more information are likely to be left disappointed.

Sonically, Dawson and his band mimic the instability of their constructed reality. Shimmering synthesisers encroach on ‘The Hermit’ while images waver in and out, and the strictly-metered vocal passages in ‘The Fool’ are interrupted by a chaotic breakdown covered in freely-improvised harp. Taken in the context of Dawson’s past work, The Ruby Cord is downright pleasant to listen to, especially when compared to the organised noise on older efforts like Nothing Important and The Glass Trunk. Even next to 2020, however, The Ruby Cord’s arrangements are strikingly pastoral. As opposed to the blunt brutality of the present, this future is cloaked in beauty, thus making the moments when the sheen is stripped away all the more disconcerting.

‘Museum’ is an exception in the tracklist, both in its further-future setting and in the stationary scene it describes. In it, a guide welcomes the first visitor to a museum “in the dozen centuries since humans disappeared”, and leads them through halls populated by projections of disembodied souls. Exhibits juxtapose alternatingly joyous and bleak scenes of human life and emotion, which are framed here not as contemporary artwork, but as objects of historical and anthropological intrigue. Despite its relative paucity of lyrical content, ‘Museum’ feels like the most fleshed-out idea on the album; the nostalgia its images evoke, as if they really were ancient history rather than our present-day surroundings, is testament to the power of the song’s concept. As a wordless singalong crescendos over a pulsating electronic arpeggio, one can imagine a group of ethereal school children bounding through the corridors, wondering why they need to learn about this archaic form of existence. The track’s place in the overarching narrative is unclear, but it serves as a refreshing, humanistic entry into the canon of “digital immortality” thought experiments.

The album concludes with ‘Horse and Rider’, which interpolates the refrain of ‘A very fine horse’ from Dawson’s pandemic mixtape, Republic of Geordieland. ‘Horse and Rider’ stands out for containing no futuristic imagery. Instead, the track tells a simple tale of escape, focusing on the bravery of the heroine and the ‘natural’ beauty of the surrounding landscape through the narration of her trusty steed. The horse’s presumed ignorance of the despair of the digital world creates a hopeful piece, clouded not by the omnipresence of technological progress, but instead by the trepidation that accompanies adventure into the unknown. Dawson’s re-use of an old melody links The Ruby Cord to the rest of his catalogue, and in doing so reinforces a connecting theme: humanity is by nature hopeful, even in the face of the unceasing horrors of our own design. ‘Horse and Rider’ could fit in any of Dawson’s temporal settings, and as such embodies this paradoxical constant of human history.

Despite its lyrical density and compelling stories, the overarching narrative of The Ruby Cord suffers at times from a lack of clarity regarding the world its characters inhabit. Additionally, while pretty, the songs are occasionally rendered over-saccharine by the oft-missing sonic bite that defined Dawson’s prior releases. But despite some gaps of unreached potential, The Ruby Cord stands as an impressive, thought-provoking conclusion to an excellent run of recordings from one of the UK’s premier active songwriters.