Ever tried keeping up with Richard Dawson? It’s a challenge that always pays off. Over the past couple of years we’ve been gifted his reflective and resonant song craft on ‘2020’, the poptastic quirkiness of Hen Ogledd’s ‘Free Humans’ and the woozy, lockdown ambience of ‘Bulbils’. Now comes more news of Dawson’s restless musicality shooting along another tangent, collaborating with the mercurial Finnish rock experimentalists ‘ Circle’, a band who trump our Geordie troubadour in the prolific stakes – 32 albums released and counting.
The partnership have announced the release of ‘Henki’ on 26th November via Weird World/ Domino, a folk/rock/metal/prog entanglement of epic ambition and invention that draws on the Circle/Dawson combo’s boundless imagination. Having previously shared the chugging, symphonic ‘Lily’ as an enticing preview of what’s to come, a second instalment ‘Methuselah’ is now ready for ears and eyes , eight plus minutes of eerily paced, unravelling riffs and dark story telling. There are twin guitars, soaring vocals, shifting gears plus the hypnotic accompanying video directed by Samuli Alapuranen that intriguingly messes with your perspective.
‘Henki’ may be playfully billed as ‘easily the greatest flora-themed hypno-folk-metal record you’ll hear this year’ but that strap line can’t hide the fact that yet another cherished Richard Dawson record is about to emerge.
Henki is available to pre order at https://www.dominomusic.com/releases/richard-dawson/henki/exclusive-limited-double-lp
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