0.0

0.0

Reader Score

No score yet, be the first to add.

0.0

Genre:

Rock / Folk/Country

Label:

tak:til

Release Date:

2026

In 1944, around the time Woody Guthrie started writing “this machine kills fascists” on his acoustic guitar, English Marxist A. L. Lloyd penned his own manifesto for folk music as a radical political tool. His booklet The Singing Englishman argued folk’s history of documenting working life had been diluted in the prettified, pastoral songbooks of commercial collectors. Cataloging songs of miners, factory workers, and trade unionists, he helped revive English folk songs as the language of tough, dangerous work and left-wing politics. “They are reports from a changing society,” he declared in the 1985 documentary Bert: A Portrait of A. L. Lloyd, “based on a tradition that seems, and sounds, eternal.”

London nine-piece Shovel Dance Collective, part of a new wave of folk revivalists in England, echo Lloyd’s belief in folk’s role of documenting working life (the shovel) and providing respite from it (the dance). Everything in Readiness collages performances of these antique songs, mixing the traditional sounds of pump organs and high whistles with avant-garde techniques like drone and tape manipulation. Marrying the lush arrangements and field-recording experiments of previous albums The Shovel Dance and The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore, it elaborates on a core idea of the group’s work since 2019. By pulling together songs and sounds across centuries, Shovel Dance Collective aren’t collecting documents of pre-industrial simplicity; they’re establishing new connections between elements of a tradition that still feel radical today.

No score yet, be the first to add.

0.0

Everything in Readiness opens with a kind of evolutionary sequence. From a primordial soup of slow, shapeless strings and pump organ, the melody of “Jer the Rigger” crawls out to the sound of a hammered dulcimer. It gives way to the blazing fiddle of “The Foxhunter’s Reel,” gradually electronically distorted, before the rocket launch opening of “Tally Ho! Hark Away!” The traditional and modern meld when the sweet high whistle melody of “Ní ar Chnoc nó ar Ísleacht (Mists Are the Best Times for Sowing)” is crushed into an industrial sound-art piece modeled on Alvin Lucier’s tape experiments. Collages of live and home demo recordings conjure a sense of the songs’ longer history. “A Hundred Stretches Hence / I Wish There Was No Prisons” opens in a field, cuts to an a capella performance in a church, then to a studio via scene-changing tape machine clicks. When Nick Granata’s soaring vocal peaks over Tom Hardwick-Allan’s trombone, backlit by a fireworks display of chiming bells, the payoff feels generations in the making.

Collage also extends or reinforces the songs’ social narratives. “A Hundred Stretches Hence / I Wish There Was No Prisons” combines two prison abolition songs dating to 1859 and 1961, respectively. As the current British government conducts a fiercely debated early release scheme, the first song’s critique of prisons still feels radical, as do its reflections on working people’s complicity in systems of control: “The instruments to snare the lag/Built by the hands they’re set to snag.” The second song adds a personal perspective, Granata’s trembling voice claiming, “I only steal my belly to fill.” The band applies a similar technique in “Jowl, Jowl and Listen Lads,” which originates from a mining song Lloyd catalogued in 1952 but borrows a verse about the death of a careful miner from a different song, “Rap Her to Bank.” Set to a drone of agonised strings, the transplant gives the song its emotional turn and adds a grim inevitability to its depiction of unsafe work practices, recalling the scrutiny giants like Amazon face over workplace injuries today.

Beneath the archival research and avant-garde flourishes, Shovel Dance Collective exude a geeky devotion—old instruments, earnest performances—that’s magnetic on its own. The album’s real treasure is a song dating to 1694 and seemingly not previously recorded: “Bold Captain Avery” tells of a pirate whose exploits became a fantasy for oppressed English workers. Inverting the maritime exploitation ballad “The Merry Golden Tree” from The Shovel Dance, this rarity is sung by Mataio Austin Dean, whose vocal creaks and shudders like the great wooden ships. An opening brass bleat conjures modern industrial vessels, then softens to a haze over rolling waves, from which Dean’s promises of wealth and adventure swell with wistful pride as his bandmates’ strings and guitar gather. His final “Believe me, my friends!” has a note of personal triumph beyond the character—a lost standard finally entering the canon of recorded folk.

0.0

0.0