The Shovel Dance

Lankum aren’t the only purveyors of doom-laden folk. London-based nine-piece Shovel Dance Collective show with this, their second album, that they can take English, Irish and Scottish folk material and spin it into something disturbingly dark and unsettling. ‘The Merry Golden Tree’ – a tale of a shipwreck – begins as if being sung privately with no thought of an audience, building with droning instruments and voices until the choruses swell into a magnificent noise. With as many as 25 instruments and eight voices between them, the Collective can make a big sound, though mostly they play with great restraint. There’s much drowning, dying and even decomposition in this collection of songs that are – and often sound here – several hundred years old. Rousing versions of ‘Newcastle’ and ‘Portsmouth’ lighten the mood briefly.