Betwixt & Between 7

A haunting split EP that kicks off with a powerful lament of a wife who wishes her cowardly husband was dead. The members of Shovel Dance Collective make it known that their purpose here is to "uncover proto-feminist narratives and queer histories", which means giving a voice to the voiceless throughout folk history. Look. I get it. You're trying to be relevant, trying to sell records, but come on, guys. I've been listening to folk for years now, and any folkhead worth his salt knows that there is plenty of feminist and queer representation in folk music. No one silenced or is silencing those voices. You just need to, ya know, listen to more folk. The fiancé of the princess, a man so beautiful that her father, the king, wants to bed him? The woman wishing she was a single girl because marriage binds, impoverishes, and neglects women? Yeah, it's all right there, and those are just a couple of examples off the top of my head.

The other side of this six-track split is led by English guitarist C Joynes who takes a "magpie approach" to fingerpicking, which means he doesn't cling to stylistic dogma that says the guitar must be played a certain way and not another. He instead collects various approaches, eclectic in his understanding of what the instrument is capable of when allowed to express other idioms and techniques.