In the 1960s, you couldn't move for girl-wants-dream-boy songs: women wrote them, men wrote them and girl groups had hit after hit with them. The Howard Greenfield/Neil Sedaka track Where the Boys Are was typical of the genre: Connie Francis didn't so much sing it as emit the lyrics in a stream of languishing sighs. Her lovelorn version is wonderful, but not a patch on the cover by the Czars. John Grant's full-throated vocal gives the song a glorious cinematic richness; what was once a girlish lament becomes headily romantic, a wonderfully mature tale of man wants man. Grant pulls off much the same trick with Abba's Angel Eyes, pouring so much emotion into the line "Look into his angel eyes" that every chorus is devastating.

These two tracks are easily the highlights of a covers album that is undeniably beautiful but so rooted in the same lachrymose register that it soon becomes exhausting. It doesn't help that some of the covers are so undistinguished: Grant brings so little to I Fall to Pieces that you wonder why he bothered. Similarly, his take on My Funny Valentine stays firmly in the shadow of Chet Baker's until it morphs, unexpectedly and brilliantly, into one of the Czars' own songs, Val. But if ever an album were worth buying for two songs only, this is it.

Download: Where the Boys Are