I worked on the first collection of Mooner covers a few years back and was excited to hear from Lee again about doing another round as they always choose the most interesting covers to do.
One thing that sticks out about this album is the care and detail that goes into the aesthetic of the cover. If the cover is fitting a style of production, those details are paid carefully attention to from the very Taylor Swift inspired Bee Gees cover You Win Again to Tears For Fears Everyone Wants To Rule The World in the vein of Vince Guaraldi. It’s not just the instrumentation Mooner chooses but the choices in mixing, recording technique and more.
My favorite song off of the whole album is easily the closing Depeche Mode cover of It Doesn’t Matter. Martin Gore is one of the best songwriters of the last 50 or so years and while we think immediately of drum machines and synths, if you were to translate any of Gore’s songs to guitar they’d easily fit with any stadium anthem. Mooner’s version showcases the brilliant songcraft Gore has a knack for, removed are the Kraftwerkian klangs of the original replaced with acoustics and organic sounding instruments.