Shovel Dance Collective's third album opens with a three-song suite running over ten minutes, and in that span it moves from a grinding one-note drone to a reel that splits the difference between trad fiddle and the Velvet Underground's Black Angel's Death Song, then detonates into Tally Ho! Hark Away! — a late-1940s hunting song buried under what the review calls 'ecstatic noise.' The instruments are unidentifiable in the clattering arrhythmic chaos. There is definitely a heavily distorted guitar. The effect is, improbably, euphoric. The nine-piece band, based in London, draws members from post-rock group Caroline, improv trio Sullow, and the 'deeply unpredictable' Gentle Stranger. What they bring to English traditional material is not reverence but a collage sensibility — the album careens from gentle lo-fi recordings thick with tape hiss to the tumultuous, surging racket of Jowl, Jowl and Listen (a traditional coalminer's song), from unaccompanied vocals set against birdsong to the disquieting ambient shimmer of Who Killed Cock Robin? A Summoning (Kind Morning in our Fists), which sounds, the reviewer notes, like it was recorded in a vast echoing crypt. The glib shorthand offered is that they're doing for traditional English music what Lankum have done for Irish folk — but the review is careful to note they sound almost nothing like Lankum. A closer comparison might be Folklore Tapes, the Todmorden-based label that releases field recordings, folk song, and avant-garde composition in chaotic collage. The texture is right; the lineage is more fractal than linear. This is not the first time English folk has bolted for the exit during a crisis. Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and Steeleye Span took root between 1968 and 1972 as 1960s optimism curdled. An indie-folk movement repurposed traditional music's sinister overtones for post-9/11 twitchiness. The review quotes Rob Young's Electric Albion on the impulse: a retreat into 'the certainties of a historical music that spoke of a more stable past.' But Shovel Dance Collective occupy the other pole — they dig out contemporary resonance from old material rather than take shelter in it. Bold Captain Avery, a 1694 broadside hymning the 'King of Pirates,' gets repurposed with full awareness that Henry Avery was a monster whose famous raid on the Ganj-i-Sawai, a ship en route to Mecca, descended into an orgy of violence that shocked his own men. The closing I Wish There Was No Prisons reads, the reviewer suggests, like a 19th-century equivalent of anarchist cost-of-living stickers. The politics are there if you want them, but the review argues — and this assessment agrees — that they're less important than how the album sounds. Everything in Readiness doesn't sound like anything else around. It makes songs that are centuries old feel, in the reviewer's phrase, 'messily, hectically alive.' That's not a small thing. It's the only thing folk music needs to do to survive.
