"Where Peasant and 2020 dealt with the past and present, The Ruby Cord is set in a future, a dystopian world finding its feet after a complete societal collapse. Dawson’s new world is part pagan folk horror, part glitch-ridden sci-fi. The very fabric of life seems to have taken on a hallucinatory warp, something that Dawson makes expressly clear in the sheer unadulterated strangeness of the album’s opening track, The Hermit. All forty-one minutes of it. The length alone gives you some clue that this is the most frighteningly ambitious thing he has ever tried. But go beyond the daunting numbers, and you will find a song that is haunting, beautiful and earthy. It is like Richard Jefferies’ proto-sci-fi novel After London, reimagined by Northumberland modernist poet Basil Bunting. The level of detail, the affinity with the natural world and the almost preposterous juxtapositions mark Dawson’s poetic voice out as something utterly unique. It’s impossible to explain exactly what goes on in the song in the space of an album review, but it is worth noting that the song is haunted by a godly Ada (presumably Ada Lovelace) and her slippers, as well as the future and past lives of fungi, a medieval knight/robot hybrid and an astonishing array of animal and bird life."
out tomorrow!