Piddling around on MySpace I happened to stumble upon some lads who put up a mildly amusing video of themselves goofing off with their semi-auto WASR-10s (or other civilian AK variant); the video itself is just, whatever, some nice slow-mo effects, especially when one of the lads chambers a round slowly during the bagpipe intro; what grabbed me was the "soundtrack" music they were using was what I later found out to be the Dropkick Murphys' song "Cadence to Arms" (from their album DO OR DIE), which starts out, like I said, with a traditional bagpipe intro but then jumps suddenly into a hard-driving punk guitar instrumental rendition of "Scotland the Brave", which made me sit up and take notice immediately . Such a bad-*ss version of the song, I had to rush out and get the CD at the earliest opportunity. It's now on my iPod too.

My other favorite Scottish rock band is an oldie (1980s) but a goodie, BIG COUNTRY, especially their song "Fields of Fire" and "In a Big Country", and though they probably wince at the fact that they're remembered mainly for this, they're the first band I know of to make electric guitars sound vaguely like Bagpipes...I loved it at the time, and that's why they're also still on my iPod decades later.

Wolfstone are cool too...more folk-rock, though.