When you think Scottish music, you generally turn immediately to bag pipes and fiddles. Coming across many a street performer piping 'Amazing Grace' in his finest kilt in my first few weeks in Edinburgh, I was beginning to think that it was more of a novelty to the Scots - say what the Hula is to some in Hawaii. (There are, I've been noticing, a lot of parallels to be drawn between the fight to preserve Highland Culture in Scotland and the fight to preserve the culture of the Hawaiian Islands...but I'll post on that later.)A couple days ago, however, while playing cards with a couple of my flatmates, Brit rock and other assorted tunes humming from one of their iPods, the twang of bag pipes blast through the room. It wasn't the New York funeral type music we're used to. Not the wafting, melancholy of a lone Scotsman...but a lively, almost jazzy melody underscored by pulsing beats not so far from the techno I'd grown accustomed to in Spain. While I suspect there are a number of outfits making neo-Scottish folk akin to my first taste of the genre, the band I'm most interested these days is the Finlay MacDonald Band. (Check out their MySpace page for more samples.)
Brilliant stuff coming straight outta Scotland.
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