The Water is the Shovel of the Shore

Shovel Dance Collective's epic album dredges down through bodies of water. It shifts through the capital, raw materials and hard labour embedded in the tidal flow of the Thames, with its history tied to the mechanics of global trade (or plunder) leading to empire, and to a British working class colonised by the inequities of capitalist industrialisation – the folks Marx and Engels thought would be the first proles to proceed from subjugation to socialism to the heaven of communism. Still waiting.

The album ranges through snatches of songs of transportation, seafaring and battle from British, Irish and Guyanese traditions. There are fiddles, flutes and drones and field recordings alongside a range of incidental sounds, voices, clatter – a kind of musique concrète woven into absorbent long-form sound collages. The album's collaborative essay focuses on the undead evils of colonialism, exploitation, slavery and capitalism, and that political depth of field is embodied in the music's multilayered, atmospheric ebb and flow, with songs and snatches of chorale and shanty rising up through its waters. The music ranges from ‘Weary Whaling Grounds’ through an anguished ‘In Charlestown There Dwelled a Lass’ to liminal snatches of ‘Lowlands’, ‘The Cruel Grave’ and ‘Grey Cock’, before submerging back into tidal flow, with the restless spirits of the subjugated, the transported, and the drowned.