By Mike Farragher

THERE are certain artists whose songs improve upon interpretation. Most realistic folks would not categorize Bob Dylan as a good singer, but he is unrivaled as a composer.

When a singer like Joan Osborne or Aaron Neville takes the mike and reimagines his songs, the composition is lifted to a new level and you appreciate the intensity of the songwriting craft at play.

U2 songs are a different kind of art. Their melodies are so gigantic that they are barely contained in the stadiums in which they are played, and Bono’s preacher-like intensity that is delivered with operatic trills makes walking a mile in his shoes an almost impossible climb.

Today FM, one of the most popular radio stations in Ireland, was able to throw its weight around to get some of Ireland’s top talents to come to their studios to record Even Better Than the Real Thing Volume 3, a collection of mostly acoustic and live U2 covers performed by the likes of the Frames, Damien Dempsey and Mark Geary. The proceeds of the two CD set will help UNICEF’s tsunami relief campaign.

Like many of the best MTV Unplugged specials that aired during the 1990s, the acoustic renditions of these songs allow for the emergence of melodic surprises and lyrical revelations that might have slid by you when you heard the hard rocking originals.

Dempsey forcefully strums his guitar and shouts the words to “Sunday Bloody” Sunday with the urgency of a busker singing for his supper at a subway stop. Luka Bloom’s “Bad,” which was first heard on his own Keeper of the Flame covers album, raises the same goose bumps when you hear it here.

Mark Geary does a naked, powerful read of “All I Want Is You.” Mundy haunts the joint of “Seconds,” and the acoustic tranquility actually works better than U2’s goose-stepping original.

I suppose I will go straight to hell for criticizing a disc that benefits charity, but there are a few skunks in this well-intentioned garden party.

First, there seems to be a lack of imagination applied to the song selection on the part of the artists. There are dozens of chestnuts on U2 albums like Boy, Zooropa and The Unforgettable Fire that have been all but forgotten by U2; it would have been a kick to hear those buried treasures instead of getting two versions of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” on the same disc.

Divine Comedy, a pretentious outfit if ever there was one, turns in a pointless orchestral read of “October,” and the Frames “40” is done in the same hard/soft Pixies style of most of their hard rock songs. That dynamic, which ordinarily works so well for Glen Hansard and the boys, falls flat on this U2 classic.

The indisputable highlight of the collection comes from “Vertigo,” which, in the hands of Kevin “Elvis” Doyle, becomes a rockabilly rave-up. This Lucan native, who moonlights as the King when he is not minding his family’s greengrocer business in Ballyfermot, extracts the punk venom from U2’s original version and adds some Graceland swing to create a karaoke classic.

U2, who wore their devotion to Presley in the Rattle and Hum biopic (who can forget the shot of Larry Mullen Jr. posing on Elvis’s hot rods during a tour stop to Graceland?), must be pleased as punch. If there is a God in heaven, he will guide Kevin Doyle into a studio and make him record a whole album of U2 covers in this style.

To purchase Even Better Than the Real Thing Volume 3, and I strongly suggest that you do, you can go on the shop page of the Today FM web site at www.todayfmstore.com. Any self-respecting fan of Bono and the boys should not be without this collection.