Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The bookend serves its purpose, it is there to keep the words and descriptions of life, the important phrases of self-determination and inspiration, safe, rigid, unyielding to the passages of Time; it is there as an aid to keeping all that a person values and holds dear, focused, the attention of what they love, and perhaps at times, what they find most distasteful in the world.
From the distance afforded by the width of The Atlantic Ocean, Europeans might look upon the last four years in the United States of America as one of insanity, of a once proud structure crumbling under the weight of its own belief, the monolith that had once been praised, now stared at in ever growing disbelief. For the citizens of that country, it has taken the form of polarisation, of dogmatic hand on hearts, of complete frustration and outrage; and in between it all the music and lyrics of Dawn Oberg is embracing the urge to damn the politics of oppression, harassment and cruelty with her usual candour and mindful liberty.
The four-year cycle of political turmoil and intrigue is one such book-end that many around the world look to define or describe the actions of the one meant to guide, but who in some more recent cases has been as divisive as a crack in the wall that won’t stop growing, and for Dawn Oberg, that crack has opened up feelings that can only ever be extinguished with hope, and with music.
To create art and understand it might not change minds, and yet remain true to your convictions is an expression of humanity, of not being swept away by your own sense of importance. When that art can open a door and let the feelings of frustration out though, when it can give rise to hope that the pain of the times could soon be stopped with the swallowing of pill designed to knock down the cracked wall, the gaping wound, and rebuild with greater confidence and with bridges to all who watched someone else set fore to the ones that had stood proudly, then you know you have found a place in which a change of mind might just be possible.
Across the three songs that make up this new E.P., the no holds barred title of 2020 Revision blazing away as a reminder to the debt we owe to all that has been destroyed and desecrated over the last four years, Mitch McConnell, Care and It’s 12.01, the sense of responsibility is palpable, the scream kept inside has found a way to be heard, the kid gloves are off and the shear, artistic, naked aggression to put things right is uppermost in the mind.
There is never normally a time to play mean, but as Dawn Oberg declares in the three songs, and with the imagery of the disgusting, even cowardly acts that have been witnessed in the United States of America in recent months, it is time for the mean, for the heavy weight responses, to begin punching back at those that would wreck the foundations just to replace a tile.
Adrenaline fuelled, anger driven, passionately played, Dawn Oberg doesn’t offer revision, she offers belief in change.
Ian D. Hall