Fionn Regan, reassuringly familiar

How fascinating this week to see the British head of state laying a wreath at Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance in honour of those who have fallen in the fight for Irish freedom. The ceremony was so knife-edge fragile that all the main players remained silent, the emotions sounded only by the Last Post and the two poetically, politically, and musically-opposed national anthems. It was a reminder that when words fail, music takes over. It must have been a challenge, then, to compile this snapshot of Irish music. What could this collection positively say about a country in the midst of yet another identity crisis?

But Music from Ireland 2011, despite its bland-as-bromide title, does tell a new story. Drawn in four chapters – Indie and Rock, Classical and Contemporary, Traditional and Folk, Jazz and World – it speaks of ethnic diversity, cultural fusion and world vision. Traditional Irish forms and sensibilities have for a long time adapted to the needs of a global market – quality-assured, optimistic, up-beat – and they sit snugly here in the company of surprisingly straight-shooting, and always well performed, essays in modern jazz (Metier’s ‘Cascade’), Congolese song (Niwel Tsumbu’s ‘Mysterious Woman’), and Country and Western (We Cut Corners’ ‘A Pirate’s Life’).

Predictably, given the international occasions it celebrates, this collection is best characterised as an exercise in amiability. Lisa Hannigan’s ‘I Don’t Know’ and Fionn Regan’s ‘Put a Penny in the Slot’ will be as reassuringly familiar to the western world’s grandparents as to its schoolchildren. Even the Classical and Contemporary chapter does its best to avoid unnecessary brooding and portrays a wide-eyed innocence, with part of Jennifer Walshe’s Nature Data and Julie Feeney’s ‘Impossibly Beautiful’ sitting nicely beside each other as examples of the kind of ‘kooky beatitude’ that’s come to define much of Ireland’s contemporary music scene.

The collection will stream online for a limited period.