Richard Dawson joins Circle for Henki — an entertainingly unbiddable album

Play “like a plant”, Circle’s guitarist Janne Westerlund told his Finnish bandmates while making Henki. Reminiscent of John Lennon’s request to Beatles producer George Martin to make a song sound like an orange, this herbivorous command is the latest in a long line of eccentricities from the cult group.

Over the past 30 years, they have spread like profuse vegetation through heavy metal, krautrock, folk, jazz, psych-rock and assorted other genres. Lyrics are sung in a made-up language called Meronian. They once swapped names with another band to record albums under each other’s moniker. Spandex features prominently in their stage outfits, like grizzled middle-aged art students, or mamil cyclists rocking out.

“We are panthers and gazelles, not slugs and tortoises,” bassist Jussi Lehtisalo said when their last album came out, 2017’s Terminal. But their carnivorous appetites have been modified for the vegetarian Henki, named after a Finnish term for spirit or essence. It teams them with Newcastle upon Tyne singer-songwriter Richard Dawson, another idiosyncratic musical figure.

Dawson is the maker of oddly shaped, distinctively flavoured solo songs, fungal outgrowths from a thick mulch of folk and underground rock. His turbulent vocals and odd tunings are an acquired taste, but worth acquiring. Comparisons have been made to Captain Beefheart.

On paper, he and the Finns are a well-made match — and so it proves in the studio. Dawson takes the role of lead singer, with Circle’s vocalist Mika Rättö doing backing vocals and playing keyboards. The seven tracks are long, lasting as much as 12 minutes. Each is named after a type of plant, a prompt for Dawson’s cleverly surrealist stories.

“Cooksonia” refers to the earliest variety of land plants in botanical history. Accompanied by a trudging, hypnotic thrum of guitars and drums, Dawson sings of the Australian botanist Isabel Clifton Cookson, after whom this extinct flora is named. His rising and falling tones have an untutored folk-club feel, with a chanted refrain that conjures the battle cry of a prog-rock Viking brandishing a pint of bitter. The sludgy music blossoms with keyboard melodies as it progresses.

“Ivy” opens with a Magritte-like image of the titular climbing plant making a moustache around a door. The portal leads mazily to the fable of King Midas, cursed with his golden touch. Circle’s soundtrack has an old-fashioned symphonic-metal heft, although without the bombast. “Silphium”, a plant from classical antiquity, finds the Finns at their most anarchic, setting up a comforting alt-rock chug only to rip it up from the roots with a four-minute instrumental breakdown and unintelligible muttered vocals.

“Silene” is a first-person account of the life of a prehistoric seed that drifts by nicely to the meandering sounds of post-rock. “Methuselah” finds Dawson adopting a mannered high voice to tell the bitterly ironic tale of the real-life US geographer Donald Currey who inadvertently chopped down one of the world’s oldest trees in 1964 while attempting to prove how long-lived it was. “Only when it was dead/Did he know he had/What he was looking for,” Dawson sings.

Death dominates the final two songs. “Lily” is about a ghost at a hospital, set to increasingly agitated rock, while “Pitcher” brings matters to a melodramatic close with a prog-metal epic about a disastrous expedition in an occult forest. True to the taste for paradox that runs through this entertainingly unbiddable album, its plant-based songs reach a bloody end.

★★★★☆

‘Henki’ is released by Weird World