Category: Scottish Music

See all the posts in this series here.

Peatbog Faeries is the sort of band I could just listen to on random shuffle and get a consistently rewarding listening experience where I constantly think “oh yeah, I love this one!” It’s hard to say they’re my #1 favorite because there are so many good bands in this genre but they’re 1000% among my top favorites.

According to Wikipedia, the band started in 1994 and the consistent members since then are Peter Morrison on pipes & whistles and Innes Hutton on bass. Regarding their first album, 1996’s Mellowosity, Wikipedia says “A key aspect is Morrison’s bagpipes being fused with world genres.” While bagpipes are present throughout many of their albums, I think Morrison’s whistle playing is maybe more central to their musical identity. They definitely draw inspiration from many different musical styles around the world, but I would say that Trance is one of the primary components added to traditional Scottish music to define their sound. Drums and electronic sounds are a big part of their music. They have fiddle too, but it plays a supporting role, less central than many other bands. Some of their albums also include horns, which I think only further improve things.

Track I always reach for first is the title track from 2005’s Croftwork:

At other times I’ve thought of The Anthropologist from the same album as my favorite:

2000’s Faerie Stories is also emblematic, both the title track and The Folk Police:

Another good one from Faerie Stories is Caberdrone:

There are so many good tracks that in looking for those I know are my favorites, I kept on coming across others I felt I need to share with you as well, like this one from 2011’s Dust:

Oh hey, here’s another one that at some points has been my favorite, The Phat Controller from 2003’s Welcome to Dun Vegas:

I can tell when I did most of my listening of Peatbog Faeries, because I think of both 2007’s What Men Deserve to Lose and 2011’s Dust as “the new album” and now they have two more which I haven’t listened to yet: 2015’s Blackhouse (which I can’t find to purchase digitally; if you have let me know!) and 2023’s I See A World. Here’s a good one from What Men Deserve to Lose:

What more can I say; if you like these as I do, go dive deep into their whole catalog.

See all the posts in this series here.

So far I’ve been roughly progressing in this Scottish music series in order of importance to me. Wolfstone is great but they’re not #3 for me; they’ve just been stuck in my head recently.

Wikipedia says “Wolfstone perform pieces from the traditional folk and Celtic repertoire permeated with rock and roll sensibilities.” They’re anchored by fiddler Duncan Chisholm and guitarist/vocalist Stuart Eaglesham, and had a rotating slate of other musicians filling out their number over the years. Seems like in the past 15 years or so they haven’t been recording and maybe they’re mostly dissolved, but they have some great albums from the 90s and early 2000s.

I mainly know the music from three of their middle albums, Year of the Dog (1994), The Half Tail (1996), and Almost an Island (2002). For some reason I don’t really know 1999’s “Seven”. I especially like The Half Tail and Almost an Island.

Some other tracks I love on Almost an Island include Elav the Terrible (especially notable in my listening to it is how it flows right in from the end of Piper and the Shrew) and 5/4 Madness.

From The Half Tail, my favorite track is definitely Bonnie Ship the Diamond, a popular whaling song in the pub sing scene. I largely love this track because it’s paired with the chorus of another song, The Last Leviathan, about the grief of whales being hunted to extinction (I’m noticing the theme of grief coming up a lot in these posts; it’s not just because of losing our cat recently or all the news worth grieving about in the world, but also aesthetically I think I just appreciate the pairing of grief themes with joy & energy themes: acknowledging that there’s a lot to be distraught about in the world but we keep soldiering on and find joy where we can).

Other tracks I enjoy from The Half Tail include Zeto, Tall Ships, and Heart and Soul. A lot of other Wolfstone tracks are fine contributions to the average background of my Celtic playlists, stuff I wouldn’t skip over, but those mentioned above (and Black Dog from Seven, the only one I know from that album) are the ones I would highlight for purposes such as this post.

See all the posts in this series here.

The first track of Shooglenifty I heard was Venus in Tweeds, and I was instantly hooked:

For me the band’s sound is epitomized by Luke Plumb’s mandolin and Angus R. Grant’s fiddle doubling on the melody, consistently supported by drums and electric guitar and with a banjo riff showing up in most tracks. Angus brought an energy that feels vaguely similar to Eugene Hütz from Gogol Bordello (maybe just the energetic charisma and wild dark facial hair, but I think also a sense of internationalism). I have not heard any of the band’s music since Angus’s death in 2016, though they brought on a new fiddler, Eilidh Shaw, and have continued to make music. I haven’t seen the full documentary yet made recently about the band’s grief and reimagining following their frontman’s death, but here’s the trailor:

I first heard Shooglenifty on pretty much every compilation album I shared in the first post in this series, and then I got their albums and immersed myself in 1994’s Venus in Tweeds, 1996’s A Whiskey Kiss, 2001’s Solar Shears, 2003’s The Arms Dealer’s Daughter (which was new when I acquired all the above), and later, 2007’s Troots. I also got the two live albums, 1996’s Live At Selwyn Hall and 2005’s Radical Mestizo (I listened to the former a lot and the latter very little).

Shooglenifty, as one review I read earlier put it, “wanders all over the musical map” in their influences, bringing in tunes and influences from all over the world, and often collaborating with musicians from other world music traditions as well. I associated them with internationalism and a perhaps-fictionalized affiliation with the seedy underbelly of European culture. At the center of it all though is “dance music” and traditional Scottish music influences, pepped up with an indomitable rejection of any orthodoxy around keeping things traditional.

Here are some of my favorite tracks, which don’t exist on YouTube as much as some bands, but which I’ve tried to link to in a streamable format for your listening pleasure:

• Farewell to Nigg (AWK)
• A Whiskey Kiss
• Hoptsoi (AWK, which I read somewhere comes from Finnish band Värttinä which is also great?)
• Good Drying (AWK)
• The Pipe Tunes (VIT, but the version on Live at Selwyn Hall is the best in my mind)
• Two-Fifty to Vigo (VIT)
• All of Solar Shears especially 29 Steps
• The Arms Dealer’s Daughter (Probably my favorite individual track besides Venus in Tweeds)
• Maxine’s Polka (TADD)
• Scraping the Barrel (TADD)
• Excess Baggage (Troots, notable because it features Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis and when they performed it in the concert I went to at Celtic Connections 2007 I hadn’t heard it before)

The band’s Bandcamp has all their music since 2003. Check them out!

See all the posts in this series here.

I associate Martyn Bennett with great musical talent gone too soon, and grieving the joyous feeling his music brought. He was firmly rooted in the traditional music of Scotland, and fused that with electronic dance beats and other cool things. I probably first heard his music on Thistle & Shamrock right after he died in 2005 at the age of 33 from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. The first album I got was GRIT, which I interpreted as being thematically grappling with the struggle with illness that weighed on his final years. Just a few years ago, my friend Alex shared with me this fantastic 28 min documentary about the album made in 2003:

I love almost every track on Grit, especially Blackbird, Chanter, Nae Regrets, Ale House, and Rant.

His eponymous first album in 1995 sounds a lot like other celtic fusion music I listened to (including Mouth Music which he contributed to and whose leader Martin Swan engineered some of Bennett’s albums) with drums, bass, synths, and Bennett’s piping and fiddling alongside samples of Scottish people singing or talking. I also like Bothy Culture which is rather playful, though it too has an infusion of grit and death in my favorite track from it, Hallaig:

He composed a longer piece called Mackay’s Memoirs for the 1999 centennial of the Edinburgh Music School, and which was also played for the opening of the Scottish Parliament, and I believe it was performed at Celtic Connections in tribute on the 10-year anniversary of his death. I didn’t realize that the recording of the composition that I’m familiar wasn’t recorded for several years and according to Wikipedia, “It was recorded on the morning after Bennett’s death on 31 January 2005 by the young people of Broughton High School who were unaware that he had died, the news being kept back until recording was over.”

In 2000 he was diagnosed, and the album he released that year, Hardland, and his final album, Grit, are more electronic and grittier (though Glen Lyon released in between is softer and focuses on his mother’s Gaelic singing). Hardland is the clubbiest of his albums, and these tracks really set the bar for the danceclub sub-sub-genre of celtic fusion music (which I associate a little less with Shooglenifty, who I’ll write about soon, but I do associate with their exhortation at the start of The Pipe Tunes on Live at Selwyn Hall, Box: “This is dance music!” This vibe is also articulated by Elias Alexander in his music which I consider very much a descendent of Martyn Bennett’s if not the grittiest Bennett vibes. If you’re into it you can watch a full set by Elias here.)

My favorite tracks on Hardland (also Distortion Pipe and This Sky Thunders, the first of his songs I had a recording of, which I can’t find videos for):

I had decided to write my first artist deep dive about Martyn Bennett a week or so ago because I really think he’s the greatest of all time, and because the early loss of him demands loving tributes hold him up as such. But then yesterday, I had to say goodbye to my beloved cat Lilly and I’m feeling extra appreciative of those who are passed. So I guess this post is dedicated to Lilly: may she and Martyn Bennett both be free of pain somewhere enjoying a sunny armchair and some kickass music.

See all the posts in this series here.

I was recently talking with my friend Anna who’s been sharing some pretty great contemporary Scottish traditional music that she’s been getting into the past few years. I don’t know a ton about recent Scottish music but I was pretty into it 15-20 years ago and I got excited about the idea of a music exchange for people familiar with different eras of this fairly niche genre. 

During college from 2004-2008 I had a radio show called “Celtic Fusion” at Connecticut College’s WCNI in New London, CT. I found my way to that genre through teenage obsession with Enya, Stan Rogers, and Simon and Garfunkel, then to exposure in high school to a diversity of music from the Thistle & Shamrock radio show hosted by Fiona Ritchie. Another way I broadened my exposure was through compilation albums: Best of Thistle & Shamrock (1999), Putomayo Celtic Odyssey (1993), Green Linnet Records 25 Years of Celtic Music (2001), Greentrax 10th Anniversary (1996), and my favorite, The Future Sounds of Gaeldom (2002). The music I loved most was more than just fiddle & Gaelic vocals: I liked the traditional dance music and the artists bringing in influences from newer/other styles of dance music.

I found over time that a lot of the music I liked was specifically Scottish, so much so that when I studied abroad in 2007 I went to Edinburgh. I don’t think I actually broadened my listening much while I was there, but I did make sure to go see many of my favorite bands and attend the Folk Music Society regularly.

Here are a few songs from Future Sounds of Gaeldom that I love but whose artists I haven’t dived deeper into:

Big Sky: Biro Guiro

It’s a little unclear if Big Sky was a band or just a concept album! That link lists its members as Charlie McKerron & John Saich of Capercaillie plus Charlie’s cousin Laura McKerron, but on the Capercaillie website Charlie’s bio says “Charlie also co-produced the album ‘Big Sky’ which involved some of Scotland’s top contemporary Celtic musicians.” It’s also bizarre that Future Sounds of Gaeldom seems to have gotten the wrong track name for the one they included from the Big Sky album! it seems like it’s actually the track called “Biro Guiro”, not the one called “Las Temporadas”, which the compilation calls this track.

NUSA, S’fhada Bhuainn Anna

NUSA is Rory Campbell & Malcolm Stitt from Deaf Shepherd. Here are the lyrics.

Alyth McCormack, Hi Horó

https://alythmccormack.bandcamp.com/track/hi-horo

Tartan Amoebas, New Day Dawning

I got their eponymous first album because of this track, but felt this was the best one on it. Every time I listen to this track I relax a little; each day is something of a blank emotional slate and you never know what new hope or joy awaits you.

Keltik Elektrik, New Mullindhu/Mullindhu

Seems like Keltik Elektrik is mostly Jack Evans from The Easy Club. The album this track is from seems cool too though I never listened to it, but it does have my favorite version of Wild Mountain Thyme, sung by Jim Malcolm who I know from the Old Blind Dogs.

Salsa Celtica, You Mi Voy/Maggie’s Pancakes

I’m going to write some more of these blog posts about specific bands (not these ones) that I got pretty into. Hope you enjoy!