Dante

Dante

Wake

(Stitch)

Scottish five-piece Dante are a band who exist on the hyphen between indie-folk. On one hand, lead songwriter Sean McLaughlin also plays with The Birthday Suit, thus providing two degrees of separation (via The Birthday Suit's Rod Jones) from the sound of the later Idlewild albums. On the other, Vicky Gray's fiddle and Stephen Thom's electric mandolin offer something from a much more traditional folk vein than what we're hearing from the likes of Frightened Rabbit. The result is music that is brave enough to leap the gap between genres, sometimes in the space of a single chorus. No Original Art has a Roddy Woomble-style vocal line and a riff that works in parallel on fiddle and fuzzy rock guitar; Son sets up a mandolin hoedown that reveals the limitations of the Mumford formula; Ghost has the lilting rhythm of a fireside session and Cheen the looser intoxicated sway of a Pogues sea shanty. But it's on the epic Northern Lights that Dante set the bar high for the indie-folk hybrid, adding post-rock atmospherics to evocative lyrics and a classic Celtic chorus.

Alan Morrison