If the future is the past and the past the future, it’s going to be quite a ride. Need a guide? Hop on with the Shovel Dance Collective.

Release Date: 11th October 2024

Label: American Dreams

Format: CD / vinyl / digital

the shovel dance?

It somehow seems apt that this 9 piece band issue this second album with the title of the dance that gave them their name. I jest, there is no such dance, unless one discounts Russ Tamblyn’s efforts in “The Fastest Gun in the West” (1958), as the band name is a metaphor, designed to recall music’s inherent ties to work, and to the release that workers found in music. Yup, a little bit o’ politics, for this is an intensely political band, with that stretching to the struggles not only of employment, but of class, colour and sexuality. All through folk music, which, lest we forget, is chock full of all of that. None of yer sweet nonny no’s here, the sound here perhaps having more akin with aspects of avant-garde drone and noisecore. It isn’t always pretty but it is affecting.

latterday rusticISm

With an all acoustic thrust, up to a pony of instruments were harmed in the making, and 8 of the 9 members have, and use, their voice. So it is maybe surprising that all starts with an instrumental, the Abbott’s Bromley Horn Dance. With possibly the most pastoral part of the album, namely birdsong, it swiftly breaks into a malevolant church organ, possibly from Daniel S. Evans, possibly Nick Granata, with an associated incumbent drone.

The sound of a dark latterday rusticism, mixing the orthodoxy of sacred with all that came before, it demands attention. Breaking then into the same theme, on harp, Fidelma Hanrahan, with strings slowly filtering in, if in the far periphery. This gradually builds. at a pace the Horn Dancers might find too slow to keep up with, woodwind blowing in like a breeze. A touch of syncopation adds a renaissance feel, some certainty that this is a false dawn, offering equivalently false reassurance. As it becomes processional, there is the sense of something wicked this way comes. Organ returns and hairs begin to raise. And settle, as it stops, a ghostly shimmer stretching this first track then into pastures new and pensive, a quiet lament, as if disembodied, singing a single stanza of The Worms Crept Out. Out of what? (You really have to ask?)

davy Jones’ locker

The daunt and impact of that 10 minute track may need to soak in for a moment or two before embarking on track 2, The Merry Golden Tree. Merry? You judge, but with the barest of initial accompaniment, the below decks quaver of Mataio Austin Dean relates the tale of high seas derring do, piracy and abduction. An accordion, from Alex Mckenzie, becomes apparent, and a chorale then peals in, possibly recorded in Davy Jones’ locker. It is haunting and strangely uplifting. Whilst his intonation may be, broadly, received folkie, the arrangement isn’t, at least of any English tradition. Lovers of Lankum with find much here to relish. The array of instruments as it draws to a close, includes a jaunty fiddle, Oliver Hamilton, and the returning harp of Hanrahan, each at odds, differently, with the narrative. it’s very impressive.

throaty vocalese

A foot providing rhythm, woodwinds, again from from Mckenzie, for O’Sullivan’s March. Without the omnipresent basement drone, and the pace of that footstep, it might be conceived to be other than the funereal it actually is. If you love dirge and drone, once more, right up your street. And mine, especially as throaty vocalese thrums in, like Keith Jarrett at a ceilidh wake. So it is quite the relief as The Rolling Wave curtsies out on a bed of harp and woodwind. Brass adds a stately air to the proceedings, with harp and fiddle, all underlayed with intermittent bodhran, from Joshua Barfoot. Life seems suddenly less grim.

Next, some massed vocals, endearingly rough and ready, casting individual trails across the melody, octaves be damned, start up for Kissings Nae Sin, the first part of a tryptych of songs. However, and irrespective that assurance, still one senses it may be, such the pulpit delivery. Banjo flickers into life, from Jacken Elswyth. Breaking into Newcastle, with bodhran, and Mackenzie’s whistle, and it is quite a different iteration from the one that Lankum, that reference again, provide. Granata is now the singer, the voice a falsetto whisper.

portsmouth?

The LGBTQIA+ aspect of the lyric should not be lost in this traditional song, the nearest to jolly yet, especially as it becomes unison hornpipe as guitar, cittern, these from Evans, and fiddle join the fray, before Portsmouth booms in with a rush of recognition. Yes, it is the tune well known from Mike Oldfield’s rousing version, a hit single in 1976. And this really is a jolly, one with basso profundo vocals, trombones and hammered dulcimer, the former from Tom Hardwick-Allen, the latter from Barfoot.

eerie traditionals

Returning to doom, gloom and acapella, Four Loom Weaver reminds as to the bleakness of the work/life balance in the pre-industrial age, starvation the difference, even if that, between employment and none. Austin Dean sings alone, and if his vocal comes elsewhere from the basement, here it comes from six feet under. Oof! Which then makes the contrast of The Grey Cock all the more shocking, the voice, this time, of Granata, pitched, comparatively, in the stratosphere. In full throttle, this time, it is an odd instrument, half choirboy, half Anohni.

The song is one of those eerie traditionals, of identity morphed and masqueraded, and where death isn’t a boundary to consummation. As it unravels, so too does the accomapaniment, an increasingly queasy dysfunction of sounds. This, I guess, is where the cited “death horns” of Hardwick-Allan come in. Increasingly distraught, the singer and the band battle it out, with Granata taking back a sort of sybaritic control. It is a weird, or should that be wyrd, and beguiling conclusion, ending on a trombone slowly dying..

challenging and innovative

Maybe not music for pleasure, this is nonetheless a pleasing release, as challenging as it is innovative. I think everybody should listen to this record at least once. And more, if at first it fails to connect. It will.

Be alarmed, be very alarmed: Four Loom Weaver.

Shovel Dance Collective online: Website / Youtube / X (formerly Twitter) / Instagram / Bandcamp

If the future is the past and the past the future, it’s going to be quite a ride. Need a guide? Hop on with the Shovel Dance Collective.