{"id":672512,"date":"2026-11-02T09:12:14","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T09:12:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/672512\/"},"modified":"2026-11-02T09:12:14","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T09:12:14","slug":"shovel-dance-collective-everything-in-readiness-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/672512\/","title":{"rendered":"Shovel Dance Collective: Everything in Readiness Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1944, around the time Woody Guthrie<\/a> started writing \u201cthis machine kills fascists\u201d 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\u2019s 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. \u201cThey are reports from a changing society,\u201d he declared in the 1985 documentary Bert: A Portrait of A. L. Lloyd, \u201cbased on a tradition that seems, and sounds, eternal.\u201d<\/p>\n

London nine-piece Shovel Dance Collective<\/a>, part of a new wave of folk revivalists in England, echo Lloyd\u2019s belief in folk\u2019s 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<\/a>, it elaborates on a core idea of the group\u2019s work since 2019. By pulling together songs and sounds across centuries, Shovel Dance Collective aren\u2019t collecting documents of pre-industrial simplicity; they\u2019re establishing new connections between elements of a tradition that still feel radical today.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

Everything in Readiness opens with a kind of evolutionary sequence. From a primordial soup of slow, shapeless strings and pump organ, the melody of \u201cJer the Rigger\u201d crawls out to the sound of a hammered dulcimer. It gives way to the blazing fiddle of \u201cThe Foxhunter\u2019s Reel,\u201d gradually electronically distorted, before the rocket launch opening of \u201cTally Ho! Hark Away!\u201d The traditional and modern meld when the sweet high whistle melody of \u201cN\u00ed ar Chnoc n\u00f3 ar \u00cdsleacht (Mists Are the Best Times for Sowing)\u201d is crushed into an industrial sound-art piece modeled on Alvin Lucier\u2019s tape experiments. Collages of live and home demo recordings conjure a sense of the songs\u2019 longer history. \u201cA Hundred Stretches Hence \/ I Wish There Was No Prisons\u201d 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\u2019s soaring vocal peaks over Tom Hardwick-Allan\u2019s trombone, backlit by a fireworks display of chiming bells, the payoff feels generations in the making.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1944, around the time Woody Guthrie started writing \u201cthis machine kills fascists\u201d on his acoustic guitar, English…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672513,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[692,93,61,60,278,514],"class_list":["post-672512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672512\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}