Shovel Dance Collective - Everything in Readiness Shovel Dance Collective

The nine-piece ensemble Shovel Dance Collective have been at the forefront of the resurgence of interest in traditional music since they came together in late 2019 and their two albums thus far – The Water is the Shovel of the Shore and The Shovel Dance – have been celebrated within, and far beyond, the confines of the folk scene in the UK and internationally. After recent acclaimed releases from artists such as Brìghde Chaimbeul, Alison Cotton and Cerys Hafana, Glitterbeat’s tak:til imprint feels like a natural home for their exhilarating third album Everything in Readiness.

The use of the term ‘collective’ in their name is significant: it tells you something about how the nine-piece outfit organise themselves, how they choose to present themselves to the world, their politics and their inclusive nature. The members have musical lives outside the collective – as solo artists, as members of acts such as caroline, Gentle Stranger and Sullow – and take an exploratory approach to how they function within the group. For Everything in Readiness, they’ve sought to build on their previous releases and their individual experiences, explaining that ‘we have spent more time playing together, developed a language for both improvising and arranging that has been road worn over many gigs. We know how to stitch things together and to integrate all the different techniques we use for recording’.

As with their previous releases, the songs on the new album are taken from myriad sources, often presented in a kind of collage. ‘The metaphor of weaving, or a patchwork quilt, increasingly feels like the best way to describe what we have done.’ they explain. ‘Not only has our own shared musical language (improvised or otherwise) developed in increasingly precise ways but also the way we mine and research increasingly specific and underperformed traditional music.’ As you’d expect, the songs included here are presented in a way that foregrounds what might have been hidden: Always alive to the political and social undercurrents in the material, here subjects like expropriation and carceral systems fall under their gaze, with the lot of the working class always at the forefront. They also point out that ‘there is just the theme, if you could call it that, of the traditional music ‘process’ as filtered through us as nine musicians, which encapsulates much of the non-linguistic quality of the record.’

Shovel Dance Collective are intelligent, questioning and fiercely political, but it would be a mistake to think their music would therefore be dry or academic. From the rousing, celebratory opener “Jer the Rigger” to the heartbreaking ‘prison medley’ “A Hundred Stretches Hence / I Wish There Was No Prisons” at the close, the album can be uplifting, sorrowful, immersive and inspiring. “The Foxhunter’s Reel” is exhilarating, “Tally Ho! Hark Away!” goes hard, embracing chaos and discord (‘as much Evan Parker as Séamus Ennis’) and “Jowl, Jowl & Listen Lads” is a roaring, thudding beast, evoking pick upon coalface and the horrors of mining.

The band have described their take on “Who Killed Cock Robin?” as ‘the pop song of the record’, despite its morbid themes, while “Bold Captain Avery” looks at the utopianism of the working class through the prism of an epic pirate ballad. The variety of approaches, of instrumentation, throughout the album is dizzying. As the band put it, ‘the arrangements we have made over time have just got bolder as we have become more fearless, not scared to ‘push the boat out’ and try out quite radical ideas at the arrangement stage. That being said we rarely talk too much in narrative terms about what we want to create and are always just organically following the shape of things.’

Everything In Readiness is an ambitious and genuinely powerful collection. It is the sound of a band fulfilling the promise of their early releases and daring to push even further, expanding the limits of what can be done with inventive recording approaches (tape manipulation, field recordings, unlikely locations), largely acoustic instruments and voices raised in defiance, sorrow or celebration. It’s their strongest statement yet, a work that contains multitudes and rewards deep listening.

RIYL

caroline, Brìghde Chaimbeul, Alison Cotton, Milkweed