Album of the week - Dexys: Let the Record Show: Dexys do Irish and Country Soul

What makes cover versions of songs such as The Town I Love So Well, I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, and Carrickfergus, work?

Are the songs any worse if they’re covered by Nathan Carter, The Irish Tenors, The High Kings? Are they better if they’re covered by Kevin Rowland, Bryan Ferry or Van Morrison? Or are they, simply, standard songs delivered, to a greater or lesser degree, by people who you sense either mean it or fake it?

Under the stewardship of Kevin Rowland, Dexys (currently dispensing with “Midnight Runners”) has always been a mercurial unit, and Rowland has always made it clear that his Irish background (he was born in Wolverhampton, 1953, to parents from Crossmolina, Co Mayo) has been crucial to his sense of identity and creativity.

As has doing the unanticipated, and we'll safely bet that there won't be a more curious curveball thrown this year than this erratic sequence of cover versions. Rowland has taken the covers route before – notably, and not a tad controversially, on his 1999 second solo album, My Beauty. On Let The Record Show: Dexys Do Irish And Country Soul, you get even more tales of the unexpected.

Gestating for over 30 years, the record's most acute flaw is that it's neither fish nor fowl: for every singular version of The Curragh of Kildare, Carrickfergus, The Town I Love So Well, Forty Shades of Green, and I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen (the "Irish" of the title), there are covers of Rod Stewart's You Wear It Well, Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now, Jerome Kern's Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, and the Bee Gees' To Love Somebody.

It would be untrue to say that Rowland doesn’t inhabit the material – and there certainly isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest he’s faking it – but too often his delivery is melodramatic, if not seriously overwrought. And, ultimately, you really have to wonder why he just didn’t go for broke with a full Irish.