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Music has a unique ability to challenge established precepts, and the Shovel Dance Collective are more aware of this ability than practically any other band currently working in the folk idiom.
Any album that approaches traditional music in an experimental way will be seen to be posing a question, and that question is, more often than not: What is folk music? Uniquely, the Shovel Dance Collective seem to have moved beyond the realm of boundary and definition into an inclusive, free-flowing, collaborational space where anything is permissible and where the meaning of a word or a phrase matters less than the creative processes that occur when two or six or nine people get together for the purpose of sharing ideas. For them, the question is not: What is folk music? but: How can we make it better?
This free-flowing spirit was captured perfectly on their 2022 debut, The Water is the Shovel of the Shore, a sprawling, four-movement opus with the River Thames at its conceptual heart. The nine members (along with their twenty-five different instruments) have reconvened to make The Shovel Dance, an album less conceptual but every bit as experimental and even more politically relevant than its predecessor.
Their version of Abbots Bromley Horn Dance begins a monstrous, droning thing, driven on by severe organ chords before the tune is taken up by delicately plucked strings. It’s a great example of how to engage with a living tradition (the Abbots Bromley dance with its famous reindeer antler display still takes place every year) by drawing on its inherent weirdness, its otherness. As an addendum, we’re treated to The Worms Crept Out, one of a small but fascinating group of songs about the decomposition of human bodies.
The Merry Golden Tree (sometimes known as The Golden Vanity or The Sweet Trinity) receives an ostensibly traditional rendition, with the vocals to the forefront, but as the song progresses, the instrumental accompaniment becomes more varied and more uncanny, while each chorus seems to gather more strength, so that when the instrumentation falls away in the song’s closing moments, the voices ring out stark and untethered: it’s a powerful, stirring passage. Similarly powerful are the harmonies that begin Kissings Nae Sin, a song that is soon transformed by Jacken Elswyth’s insistent, impressionistic banjo before morphing into the tender, lively Newcastle and the raucous Portsmouth.
O’Sullivan’s March is stately and solid but carries hints of an underlying wildness, while The Rolling Wave is jaunty and bucolic from the off, played with sensitivity and adroitness. Four Loom Weaver sees the group at their most political: Austin Dean’s unaccompanied vocal seems to pierce through the darkness and the poverty of the lyrics. It’s a song full of anger and resignation, and it is impossible to ignore its contemporary relevance. This is, according to the group, an example of their rejection of linear time and of perceived historical narratives. Music has a unique ability to challenge established precepts, and the Shovel Dance Collective are more aware of this ability than practically any other band currently working in the folk idiom.
The album’s final track, the well-known night-visiting song The Grey Cock, creates a singular and spooky atmosphere. A series of drones and screeches accompanies the ghostly tale, and when the revelation of Willie’s true identity occurs, the song climaxes in a dramatic, discordant maelstrom, becoming thick with a creeping sense of dread, before a melancholy horn melody leads the album to its satisfying conclusion.
A kind of avant-folk supergroup, but without any of the hubris that term implies, the Shovel Dance Collective are at the forefront of a new wave of traditional music, one which looks to the future and the past simultaneously. With their collaborational and often improvisational methods, they are changing the way folk music is created, putting an emphasis on its otherness, its queerness, its capacity for contemporary political comment and most importantly, its inclusivity. And what’s more, they are doing it with breathtaking, potent tunes.
The Shovel Dance (11th October 2024) American Dream Records
