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The nine-piece London-based group take a radically fresh approach to traditional music, sounding raging, lo-fi and joyful as they link Britain’s violent past to its present
Those thus far unaware of Shovel Dance Collective’s bracing approach to folk should probably note that their third album is not much interested in breaking newcomers in gently. Everything in Readiness kicks off with a three-song suite that lasts more than 10 minutes and takes you, via a series of dramatic sonic jump-cuts, from a grinding one-note drone to a reel that seems to split the difference between trad folk fiddle-playing and the punishing squall of the Velvet Underground’s Black Angel’s Death Song. It then leaps to Tally Ho! Hark Away!, which sets a hunting song first collected in the late 1940s over a blast of what might best be described as ecstatic noise. It’s genuinely hard to work out what instruments are involved in the clattering arrhythmic chaos behind the vocal – there’s definitely a heavily distorted guitar in the mix – but the effect is weirdly euphoric rather than claustrophobic: a kind of purgative release after the mounting weirdness of the preceding reel.
If you’re looking for evidence that the nine-piece London-based group take a radically fresh approach to folk music, then there it is. The glib shorthand is that they’re doing for traditional English music what Lankum have done for its Irish equivalent – joining the dots with the kind of out-there experimentation that fills the pages of the Wire magazine – although it should be pointed out they sound almost nothing like Lankum. Anyone who already has an interest in leftfield explorations of British musical history might suggest their chaotic collage approach feels more akin to the fascinating collections of field recordings, folk song and avant garde composition released by Todmorden-based label Folklore Tapes. The music on Everything in Readiness careens unpredictably from gentle lo-fi recordings caked in distortion and tape hiss to the tumultuous, surging racket they serve up on their version of the traditional coalminer’s song Jowl, Jowl and Listen; from singing unaccompanied by anything but the sound of birdsong to the disquieting ambient shimmer of Who Killed C*** Robin? A Summoning (Kind Morning in our Fists), which sounds like it was recorded in a vast, echoing crypt.
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