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 Cock Robin?
A Summoning (Kind Morning in our Fists), which sounds like it was recorded in a vast, echoing crypt. It’s an experience that leaves you feeling faintly punch-drunk and disoriented. Everything in Readiness ultimately doesn’t sound like anything else around, but perhaps it’s not so surprising that a bunch of experimental musicians – various members also serve in post-rock band Caroline, improv trio Sullow and the deeply unpredictable Gentle Stranger – have embraced traditional music.
English folk in particular has a tendency to slip its standard moorings at times of crisis and find musicians and an audience outside the usual clubs and festivals. The electric folk wave of Fairport Convention, Pentangle and Steeleye Span took root between 1968 and 1972 as the optimism of 60s counterculture curdled into the dark reality of the early 70s. The indie-folk movement that begat folktronica and the founding of Green Man festival, repurposed traditional music’s more sinister overtones, its eerie bleakness, for the twitchy, post-9/11 years.
It’s an impulse you could view as a retreat into “the certainties of a historical music that spoke of a more stable past”, as Rob Young’s peerless history of “Britain’s visionary music” Electric Albion called it. Equally, given folk’s visceral bloodiness and bursts of political radicalism, it could be a search for connection, a reaffirmation that this country has always been turbulent, violent and deeply strange. Shovel Dance Collective, with their loudly trumpted leftwing politics and willingness to dig out contemporary resonances in material hundreds of years old, clearly fit the latter category.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
