Putumayo Presents Women of the World Celtic

Yep, I’m back on the females of celtic extraction beat. Once again not a single Celtic Woman is on this album. And this one is similarly liberal with its definition of “Celtic”. There’s a lot of celtic-flavored rock and downbeat butting up against Irish or Scottish music on here. According to what I could find online, Putumayo is an American world music record company that grew out of a chain of ethnic-kitsch shops. The cover has a childrens’-book-sold-at-Pier 1 Imports vibe, and it’s in very good condition for a Digipak from the ‘90s. The interior booklet contains no lyrics and spends almost as much page space on the history & provenance of the radio show “The Thistle and Shamrock” as it does on any individual song. It also has lazy typos (the “Chanel Island” of Jersey). It’s a compilation, so no original songs written or mixed specifically for this disc.

We start off with Máire Brennan, perhaps better known as a member of Clannad (and Enya’s older sister) doing what I can only describe as historical action movie montage music. Unwelcome synths and fretless basses make themselves known on the next few tracks. The two Karen Matheson tracks sound like someone crooning over a Donkey Kong Country background track. The two Mary Black songs are basically a Dave Matthews hoedown and a nationalistic torch song respectively. The only song that really scratched at my itch on here was Máiread Ní Mhaonaigh’s “Dúlamán”. Most of the material on here is on the spectrum of “not great” to “just not for me”. 90s celtic music is a big tent, but perhaps this comp cast its tent too big.

Putumayo Presents Women of the World Celtic is a bad compilation and I don’t like it.