"Tradition is not the worship of ashes," the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) once observed, "but the preservation of fire."

That quote came to mind as I listened to Look Over the Wall, See the Sky. It's the second solo album by John Francis Flynn, a leading performer in the new generation of Irish folk musicians. To borrow the cliche, this isn't your grandparents' Irish music, nor is it the quasi-orchestral, so-called Celtic music that was all the rage a few decades ago. It certainly isn't the pub sound of the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem or the Dubliners, during whose passage we of a certain age stepped on board. It isn't even the Pogues.

It is, however, in the spirit of Flynn's contemporaries, prominently including Lankum (whose False Lankum I reviewed here on 16 September 2023) even as Flynn doesn't sound like that band either. What they -- and other solo and group acts that haven't made it to these shores yet -- have in common is a notably modernist approach to tradition that manages paradoxically to come off not as repudiation but as affirmation.

For all its modernist arrangement and heavy electronic presence, few listeners will fail to recognize Look Over the Wall as a folk recording by an artist who knows and reveres the material. Here, the production usually alternates between past and present, leaving room for instruments such as fiddle, pipes, acoustic guitar and occasional brass, and even for snatches of unaccompanied singing, while welcoming experimental sounds on instruments not remotely imagined when the old ballads and tunes were invented.

The most intensely current (or even futurist) production is turned on an old, though not an Irish, folk song, "Mole in the Ground," most famously associated with North Carolina banjo player and collector Bascom Lamar Lunsford. He didn't write it -- like many traditional songs it's of anonymous authorship -- but his 1928 recording appears on Harry Smith's influential Anthology of American Folk Music (first issued in 1952). Smith himself characterized it simply as "surrealistic." In When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (1996) Robert Cantwell imagines the narrator to be a "man not at home where destiny has placed him," awash in self-loathing and a desire for vengeance, in the lowly company of moles and lizards, against his enemies.

On the other hand, Flynn deems it an "anti-capitalist" anthem. In his occasional observations on the song, he states as much as if it were manifestly true. It is certainly the case that a song means whatever the listener thinks it means. Holding no sentimental affection for capitalism myself -- I grew up in a union family at a time when such disdain was akin to mother's milk -- I have no objection, ideological, moral or merely practical, to that interpretation, even if mine is closer to Cantwell's than to Flynn's. Still, there can be no ambiguity on one issue, namely that this would not have been Lunsford's reading. Urban folk musicians and fans who interacted with him during the mid-century revival came away shocked at his incorrigibly reactionary politics, on one level expressed in fierce racism and open anti-Semitism. Though an educated man (a lawyer), he appeared to possess just about every ugly belief and prejudice known to suffering humanity.

"Mole" is also the most startlingly refashioned of the eight cuts here. It isn't sung, it's spoken, and it tip-toes on an electronic high wire. If my experience is like yours, it's the one that takes the most getting used to. The good part is that it keeps me returning to it, trying to sort out and embrace its curious dynamics.

It is, moreover, probably one of the two songs American listeners will recognize immediately. The Irish numbers are not the standard ones, always a sign that the performer is more than a tourist. Interviewed in The Guardian not long ago, Flynn explained that the album is about his beloved Dublin, a city under threat by powerful forces willing to decimate its history and character in pursuit of profit. That explains why the concluding cut is the often-covered "Dirty Old Town," which Ewan MacColl wrote about a district in Manchester, England, but which Flynn transforms into the place whose fire he strives to preserve.