The album cover features a grinning skull wearing a top-hat. Inside, the cover displays a tarot card: The High Priestess to be precise.

So what are you in for when you put on the album: Mojo Magik by Indigo Mojo? An essay on the occult? The voices of dead people committed to a grainy Eddison tube? Or an hour's worth of straight rock and blues covers?

See if you can guess.

Dance Floor Fillers:

Cover bands are a difficult breed to fathom. Very often, they are very good. They produce all the right solos in all the right places, and they can certainly bring the crowds in. A floor can easily be filled by a decent rendition of an old classic - just because people know it.

Meanwhile, much to the disappointment of the band in question, an audience will give up when the time comes for the band to play one of their own songs.

Bands like Shelby will put on their press release "We don't do covers" just to make sure that the people who want them to do "Brown Sugar" won't show up. But that is a luxury that bands like Indigo Mojo can't afford. Because to a regrettably large extent, the audiences who want them to do "Brown Sugar" are their entire raison d'être.

In the case of Indigo Mojo, this is a huge pity. They are an exciting, hugely passionate band who play and sing from their hearts. But this all seems to be a waste when all they do is covers of songs that have been covered too many times before.

It's A Cover Up Job:

All the standards are there, present and correct: Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple and Thunderclap Newman. It's foot tapping worthy stuff, and delivered with a great deal of energy. No better example can be found than that of "Can't Get Enough" half way through. It's got everything: excellent musicianship and feisty singing that truly involves itself in the lyrics.

A rather strange thing is the cover of Smoke on the Water. Rather than sounding like the Deep Purple original, it sounds like it's going to break off into the chorus of Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" within a moment's notice.

They Have Got to Get it Together:

"Something in the Air" is a great song. Particularly when you bear in mind that the drummer on the original was the most nerdy looking man in Britain. But in the hands of Indigo Mojo, something is lost. Lead singer, Jane Pearl adopts the voice of a female Liam Gallagher (Liamella Gallagher anyone?) And strains her way around a tune that clearly wasn't designed for her vocal chords.

Joie de Vivre:

Indigo Mojo enjoy what they are doing. You can hear that clear enough, especially on their live New Year's Gig CD (memorably featuring Fleetwood Mac's "Black Magic Woman") where the atmosphere of that night three months ago sounds so fresh that you feel like you are/were there.

If only there were some more original tracks on the CD, the listening experience would be so much more worthwhile. Indigo Mojo clearly have the energy and capability to produce more than an album's worth of decent original songs. Instead, we are left with a second best collection of songs that have probably been covered once too many times already.

Indigo Mojo are capable of much more. Let's hope their next release shows the talent they seem to be hiding.

18/03/04 - First published on www.bbc.co.uk/gloucestershire on this link