“Somehow, we always reached together towards the sublime.” So say London‘s Shovel Dance Collective about the burgeoning connection within the project. Originating with Daniel S. Evans, Alex McKenzie and Joshua Barfoot but quickly growing to house nine members, the outfit owes an equal debt to traditional folk music and the avant garde, searching for ways to push acoustic instruments toward new planes. “We want to play and experiment, layer and move between different spaces in recording, and extend the limits of our instruments to sing and break in new ways,” the band explain. “Improvising, textural playing, and moving as one free organic organism are all part of the experiments we try and make in form. It’s all towards this one goal: constructing the Shovel Dance world and saying what we feel needs saying.”
This October, Shovel Dance Collective are releasing The Shovel Dance, a full-length album on American Dreams which feels in many ways a culmination of such intentions. An effort to combine the band’s innate inventiveness and towering live shows with the polish and possibility of the studio. First single ‘The Merry Golden Tree’ is the ideal introduction to the record. A reimagining of a traditional British folk song which spends its early minutes grounding the listener within that context. A stripped back sea shanty hushed with the inevitable loss of grand adventure, the titular vessel just another claimed by the ocean’s mysterious whims. None of the authenticity is lost as the track progresses, though it soon becomes clear it is far more than a simple folk song. Rather, Shovel Dance Collective position themselves within an exciting contemporary movement, and The Shovel Dance is sure to join the likes of Lankum’s False Lankum and Shane Parish’s Liverpool in their mission to push old sounds and stories into new dimensions.
