Crossing The Pond: dante

Yes, my little sweeties, yours truly has been known to be quite an Anglophile. And seeing as I’ve been feeling a wee bit nostalgic regarding my many wonderful months spent in bonnie Scotland, I figured now was the perfect time to launch a feature focusing on, you guessed it, bands from the United Kingdom (and Ireland).

I couldn’t ask for a better band to start things off with, given my love of those bands from north of the Borders. Dante is a band of “Edinburghers and Shetlanders who make alt folk music,” but that’s just the very vaguest of overviews of what this band does. Yes, there is indeed folk in mass quantities in their music, no doubt about it. But these wonderful souls also incorporate hearty doses of traditional Scottish music into their fine, fine songs, mostly exhibited with that fantastic fiddle. It’s a delicate balance of old and new, and it works together seamlessly, beautifully. At times you might hear shades of my beloved Idlewild, be it in the dark contemplation of the lyrics to the building walls of instrumentation present in dante’s songs. And on certain occasions, you might just think you were dancing at a traditional ceilidh somewhere in the countryside as the fiddle does cartwheels all around.

Dante is a band not to be missed, ye lords and ladies. Whet your appetite with the pair of songs below, and prepare to fall in love.

mp3: Monochrome (dante from the Monochrome EP)

mp3: This Island (dante from the Monochrome EP)