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. You could view the closing I Wish There Was No Prisons as the 19th-century equivalent of those anarchist stickers that have proliferated during the cost-of-living crisis (“if you saw someone shoplifting, you didn’t”), although their approach is clearest on Bold Captain Avery, a 1694 broadside that hymned the “King of Pirates” as a bold freedom fighter, “disowned” by his native country but having at the foreigners and “heathens” in the name of St George. The reality is that Avery was a monster driven by the accumulation of wealth, whose most famous raid – on the Ganj-i-Sawai, a ship en route to Mecca – descended into an orgy of violence that seemed to shock even his own men. It doesn’t take a genius to grasp why Shovel Dance Collective might have repurposed it for 2026.
It’s intended as no shade on the band’s political leanings to suggest all this feels less important than the way their third album sounds: it’s there if you want to find it and that’s undoubtedly a good thing, but the most immediate pleasure of Everything in Readiness lies in the head-spinning sonic surprises it delivers. As it lurches wildly around, you find yourself struggling to keep up, a sure sign that you’re in the presence of music that feels entirely fresh and different. It makes songs that are centuries old feel messily, hectically alive.
This week Alexis listened to
Darren Hayman – Close Your Eyes and Face the Sun
The latest of singer/songwriter Hayman’s idiosyncratic DIY projects involves making an album using only the once-ubiquitous, now outdated DX7 synth. Here, it (and he) sound fragile and lovely in equal measure.
