Peasant is a studio album by avant-garde folk musician Richard Dawson, released on 2 June 2017 by Weird World. Each song on the album is from the perspective of a different fictional narrator. Although it is set in the Kingdom of Bryneich, from the 400s to the 600s CE, it is intended to be a modern record, the stories and plight of each character largely contain universal themes that connect to the present day.[1]

Peasant
Studio album by Richard Dawson
Released	2 June 2017 (2017-06-02)
Genre	Progressive folk
Length	58:46
Label	Weird World
Richard Dawson chronology
Nothing Important (2014) Peasant (2017) 2020 (2019)

Reception

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
AnyDecentMusic?	8.3/10[2]
Metacritic	82/100[3]
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[4]
Financial Times	[5]
The Guardian	[6]
Mojo	[7]
Pitchfork	8.0/10[8]
Q	[9]
Record Collector	[10]
Uncut	8/10[11]

Peasant received acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 82 based on eleven reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[3] The Quietus listed it in first position on their list of the best albums of 2017,[12] and it placed second in The Wire magazine's annual critics' poll.[13] Exclaim! listed it at number 8 on their Top 10 Folk and Country Albums of 2017 list.[14]

In his review of the album for The Quietus, Danny Riley described Peasant as "a work reclaiming meaning of words like "folk" and "community," a complex parable and a force for unification in divisive times" and described Dawson's avant-garde approach to folk music as "more a prickly thicket of brambles than a bed of moistened leaves, with creakily bowed strings, spiky rushes of acoustic guitar and occasional splurges of noise."[15]

Track listing

References