Shovel Dance Collective: Everything in Readiness review – ecstatic, dissonant folk music fighting for sonic and spiritual freedom

Shovel Dance Collective’s third album, *Everything in Readiness*, recasts traditional British folk through distorted recordings, drones, noise and abrupt shifts in sound. The review describes its mix of old songs and experimental arrangements as both disorientating and euphoric, offering a forceful account of Britain’s turbulent past that resonates with the present.

The nine-piece London group move between lo-fi recordings, unaccompanied singing, ambient passages and a tumultuous version of the coalminers’ song “Jowl, Jowl and Listen”. The album opens with a suite lasting more than 10 minutes and includes a late-1940s hunting song, “Tally Ho! Hark Away!”; the closing track is “I Wish There Was No Prisons”. The review places the group’s approach in a wider tradition of folk revivals during periods of social crisis, while emphasising its distinctive sound and left-wing politics.