Paul Weller: Find El Dorado (digital outlets)

Although El Dorado is a mythical place made of gold and somewhere in the jungles of South America (possibly given extra embellishment by local tribes to throw off Spanish invaders) it seems Paul Weller is intent on finding it.

But his gold are songs that he unearths and covers for this album.

Let's be honest however, with a few exceptions – Bowie's Pin Ups, Lennon's Rock'n'Roll and Rod Stewart's recent Great American Songbook series – covers albums send a shiver through the colons of accountants in record companies.

They rarely sell much.

The reasons for their poor showing is fans want artists doing their own songs and covers often invite unfavourable comparisons with the originals.

The successful ones (like the Bowie and Lennon, although the latter's wasn't that successful) are usually driven by the artist's reputation. Others (like the Stewart series) serve to rehabilitate an artist after some fallow years.

Ask yourself, can you name any Rod Stewart album in the late Nineties before the Songbook series?

There were actually three.

(Follow-up question for bonus points, can you name his last three albums?)

Paul Weller sidesteps those sinkholes here with songs which – aside from a stately revision of the Bee Gees' maudlin I Started a Joke (he rates the lyrics much higher than this writer) and Richie Havens' socially conscious folk-blues on Handouts in the Rain – are largely unfamiliar.

And he finds the reflective centre of relatively unassuming songs recast as soulful folk (Bobby Charles' Small Town Talk) or Irish folk (the title track by the late Eamon Friel, One Last Cold Kiss by American hard rockers Mountain).

His broad remit takes him into American country (Merle Haggard's White Line Fever), has kora player Seckou Keita sprinkling magic on Journey and Robert Plant in for the folk-blues of Clive's Song by Clive Palmer, a founder of the Incredible String Band.

Despite being a dreaded covers album – his second after 2004's Studio 150 – this succeeds and slips effortlessly into Weller's recent catalogue which has been consistently interesting: On Sunset, Fat Pop and 66.

And, against expectation, it seems to have worked.

Dad folk-rock it may be, but it debuted top five in Britain.

El Dorado, discovered at last?

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You can hear this album at Spotify here.