Shovel Dance Collective's Everything in Readiness: Folk as Euphoric Noise

Shovel Dance Collective's third album, Everything in Readiness, opens with a three-song suite lasting more than 10 minutes. The nine-piece London-based group released the record on the tak:til label, and it shows no interest in easing newcomers in.

The opening suite moves through dramatic sonic jump-cuts. It begins with a grinding one-note drone. It then shifts to a reel that splits the difference between traditional folk fiddle-playing and the punishing squall of the Velvet Underground's Black Angel's Death Song.

What does the opening sound like?

The suite then leaps to Tally Ho! Hark Away!. The track sets a hunting song, first collected in the late 1940s, over a blast of ecstatic noise. The clattering, arrhythmic chaos behind the vocal makes it genuinely hard to identify the instruments involved, though a heavily distorted guitar is definitely in the mix. The effect is weirdly euphoric rather than claustrophobic — a purgative release after the mounting weirdness of the preceding reel.

Where does the group sit in the folk tradition?

The glib shorthand, according to the Guardian's review, is that Shovel Dance Collective are 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. The review cautions, though, that they sound almost nothing like Lankum.

A closer comparison lies elsewhere. Listeners already versed in leftfield explorations of British musical history might find their chaotic collage approach more akin to the collections of field recordings, folk song and avant-garde composition released by Todmorden-based label Folklore Tapes.

How varied is the album's sound?

The music on Everything in Readiness careens unpredictably across registers:

• Gentle lo-fi recordings caked in distortion and tape hiss
• The tumultuous, surging racket of their version of the traditional coalminer's song Jowl, Jowl and Listen
• Singing unaccompanied by anything but the sound of birdsong
• The disquieting ambient shimmer of Who Killed Cock Robin? A Summoning (Kind Morning in our Fists), which sounds as if it was recorded in a vast, echoing crypt

That range — from birdsong to crypt-like echo — is the album's defining trait. The group links Britain's violent past to its present through sound that registers as raging, lo-fi and joyful at once, fighting for what the review calls sonic and spiritual freedom.

What does this mean for folk music?

The album confirms a radical reframing of traditional English music as raw material for experimentation rather than preservation. For listeners willing to sit through drones, distortion and tape hiss, Everything in Readiness offers a purgative, euphoric payoff — and positions Shovel Dance Collective alongside Lankum and Folklore Tapes as standard-bearers for the genre's avant-garde wing.