Music / Reviews
Review: Shovel Dance Collective, Arnolfini – ‘Fine fluidity and freedom’
The opening night of this year’s Bristol Folk Festival just happens to fall on May Day. Whether by accident or design, Shovel Dance Collective are a perfect fit for this date’s dual significance as International Workers Day and the traditional start of summer.
Performing in front of a banner calling workers to arms, the nine-strong ensemble open with a May carol, sung in the fathoms-deep baritone of Mataio Austin Dean. He later explains that the traditional ‘branch of may’ that adorns the front of the stage was foraged at a service station on the M4, and disappointingly turned out to be the wrong plant.
Shovel Dance Collective (C) Bristol Folk Festival Paul Blakemore
The intersection of tradition and politics runs right through Shovel Dance Collective, informing both their choice of songs and the way they’re presented. There’s a sense that recurrent themes – class struggle, gender and sexuality, a racially diverse sense of national identity – are not exclusively modern perspectives, but ones that can be heard in songs passed down through the centuries.
On their albums, the ballads and dance tunes are interspersed with field recordings and sound effects, providing a foggy context that becomes clearer with each listen. Themes are expressed more explicitly in live performance, as when they draw attention to the homoerotic subtext of drowning ballad Lake of Coolfin. Sung with piercingly heartfelt clarity in the vibrato-laden voice of Nick Granata, it’s a clear standout of tonight’s set. Elsewhere, Mataio Austin Dean points to the racial politics of The Brown Girl, a song of love and revenge that is thought to go back to the 17th Century.
Having nine musicians on stage, many of them multi-instrumentalists, allows for a huge amount of sonic variation. The most dramatic numbers are often the most stripped down, with just solo or harmony vocals accompanied by Granata’s austere pedal organ.
At other times the band launch into lush, prog-leaning improvisations employing everything from banjo (Jacken Eswyth) and bass clarinet (Alex Mackenzie) to fiddles, whistles and guitars. Tom Hardwick-Allan brandishes a shortwave radio at one point, channelling murky, disembodied voices into the mix like the unquiet dead of shipwrecks. There’s a sense of fluidity and freedom in these full band numbers, especially noticeable in an Irish medley that’s swept along thrillingly by Joshua Barfoot’s mercurial drumming.
An audience member requests The Merry Golden Tree, and it seems as though the band were about to play it anyway. Effectively their signature song, this sea shanty about a heroic cabin boy betrayed by his captain is Shovel Dance class politics in a nutshell. Mataio’s powerful, rasping voice leads as the other members of the collective are gradually pulled in towards a showstopping crescendo.
The set ends with all nine members standing in song, bringing us full circle to the summery theme with an a cappella rendition of Hal-an-Tow. Consider the ‘May-o’ abundantly welcomed in.
Top image (C) Bristol Folk Festival
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