Features...

Grace & Pride *****

Capercaillie have successfully notched up their first 20 years by being a canny and thoughtful lot, qualities reflected in the reverse chronology of this anniversary retrospective. Thus we open with three cuts from last year's Choice Language, displaying all the maturity that underpins their place in today's international Celtic front rank. Two-and-a-half hours and 38 tracks later, we close with the signature reel from their debut recording Cascade, released when the original line-up - centred on singer Karen Matheson and accordionist/keyboard player Donald Shaw - were still teenagers, fresh out of Oban High School.

This literally retrospective approach is a simple but effective gambit, high-lighting Capercaillie's cutting-edge track-record and the extent to which their hallmarks were foreshadowed in earlier work. Somehow it seems all the more remarkable that Waiting For the Wheel To Turn (from the album Delirium), or Fosgail An Dorus / Nighean Bhuidh' Ruadh (from Sidewaulk), are - respectively- 13 and 15 years old, when they're framed in advance by samples from the band's 10 subsequent albums.

It's also telling that the former track is reprised here in its 12-inch remix version. Quite apart from the still-fresh sharpness of the arrangement, aligning taut dance grooves, ballad-style vocals and traditional instrumentation in truly pioneering style, who else was issuing remixed singles of Scottish folk-based material in 1991? This was Capercaillie's most fmoulsy groundbreaking feat, when their funked-up reinvention of a 400-year-old Gaelic waulking song, Coisch A Ruin, reached the UK top 40.

With UK sales of 100,000, Delirium certainly marked a breakthrough for the band in terms of profile, but - as Grace and Pride makes clear - should no overshadow the significance of its four predecessors. It's hard to remember now, but Scottish folk music was seriously in the doldrums back in 1984, albeit that the Highlands remained a relative bastion of tradition.

Even to espouse folk music was seriously outrÈ among Capercaillie's generation - let alone Gaelic song; let along trying to make a career of it. Nonetheless, armed with abundant talent and a contemporary vision the band became one of the first acts to reposition Scotland's msical heritage in the context of the blossoming world music boom, while combining it with the new wave of clubland sounds.

Post-Delirium, Capercaillie experimented further with pop-style compositions and arrangements, sometimes to anodyne effect. From the longer perspective enabled here, however, these years can still be seen as important ones developmentally, as the band wrestled with the challenges of writing original, English-language material to stand alongside their timeless Gaelic songs, as well as the multiple possibilities - for good and ill - inherent in the Scottish roots-fusion sound they'd invented.

From 1997's Beautiful Wasteland onward, all this creative legwork can be hear to bear increasing fruit, in the sound of a band more and more at ease with themselves, happily - though never complacently - at home in the niche they've carved out. With its balance of continuity, contrast and evolution, Grace and Pride is an eloquent testament both to Capercaillie's seminal role in making Scottish music what it is today, and to their continuing pursuit of excellence and innovation.

Sue Wilson