A sensitivity to such stories, a willingness to turn his attention to these underrepresented corners of British life – vacant stares, tacky furniture, daytime TV – is an established strength of Dawson’s songwriting. This album, however, does not represent the best of his observational work, and often finds him seeming to repeat himself in the mission to write the same song over and over.
Richard Dawson is one of the most original composers in British music today, improbable and ambitious at the micro level of line-to-line structures as well as on the scale of a full song. His music evolves folk idiom into his own idiosyncratic style, lyrics growing naturally around the peculiarities of the electric guitar. This ability is manifest on End of the Middle, but in its repetitious treatment of similar subjects the conviction of his forms feels lacking.
The entrenchment of motifs across a record is often something that weaves an album together, but what we experience here ends up as more of a blurring between specific songs. The repetition of domestic imagery and daytime TV name-checks in opening songs "Bolt" and "Gondola" creates a transition not unlike the slide between Lorraine and This Morning on ITV1. There is a vividness to Dawson’s observations, which at points make for a worthy documentation of the left behind of post-Fordist Britain (see especially "The question" and "Removals Van"), but at others feel over-rehearsed and predictable. Too often, the record lacks the transformative power songwriting can achieve, serving only an honest realism.
‘The question’ is the track with which this album really
gets going. Unlike the rest of the record, it transcends daily life,
undercutting it with a ghost story that imbues its mundane details with a
richer meaning. The narrative, which swells along with a brilliantly
spiralling, hand drawn guitar riff, tells of a woman haunted by visions
of a stationmasters ghost, whose titular question is “Where are you
going?” Though a fantastical diversion, the song is in keeping with this
albums realist motif of lost opportunities in modern Britain, the
stationmaster, as it is revealed, being a victim of de-industrialisation,
who worked on a line long since closed down. His question crystallises
his position as a being a victim of History but also challenges the
validity of such a future which has limited its own possibilities. (A
worthy point of diversion here is Gareth Dennis’ new book How Railways
Will Fix The Future, which argues the case for future expansion of
railways for the common good). In its synthesis of the fantastic with
the mundane (the ghost narrative cuts to an account of the woman leaving
for Cambridge University and then going onto the LSE), this song
reveals the weakness of the more sober realism of the writing elsewhere
on the album.
"Boxing Day Sales" and "Knot" are two more strong tracks in
their own right, though their parallels of technique and meaning causes
further elision of expression. In the former, two customers shelter
from a hailstorm and, “over a scone”, one asks of the other’s daughter,
“Is Ellie still tap-dancing?” a moment encapsulating existential dread
such desultory conversation can inspire. In the latter, a similar
juxtaposition is established with more intent, this time at a wedding
scene, drawn with several clever flashes, the pick of which may well be,
“How have you been getting on? / Sausage rolls and vol-au-vents”. Both
songs are good expressions of a similar feeling, but placed together,
they give away each other’s secrets.
Ultimately, our feelings about this record must be decided
by what we want from the album form. End of the Middle collects
several well-executed compositions, packed with insightful lyrics and
unpredictable musical sections. Though there are some weaker pieces, all
of the songs bear witness to certain experiences that are not
conventionally represented in song and serve as an interesting
documentation of our present. If, however, we look to an album as a
complete artistic statement, we do not quite find it here because so
many tracks double back on scenes, images and themes already addressed
elsewhere. Perhaps we should instead see them more like paintings made
in a similar period, with ideas organically cannibalised from one work
to another. As a curated sequence of tracks, however, this arrangement
feels ultimately unsatisfying. There is a poetry to the mundanity that
serves as Dawson’s subject matter, which he draws out in its best
moments. At others, however, his writing gets mired in merely setting
down dutifully that which lies before us.
