Recorded in a day across various locations by a cast of 22, Help! A Day In The Life is the second WarChild album, the objective being to raise funds for child victims of global conflict. The humanitarian nature of the enterprise is unquestionable; the content, like an afternoon in a decent flea market, rewards browsing time with rare treasure (the first album, you may recall, boasted The Manics doing ‘Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head’ and Sinéad’s impeccable ‘Ode To Billie Joe’).
For the sake of avoiding an argument we should group the contributors into cliques. There are the phantom balladeers’ burnt offerings, the best of which is Radiohead doing ‘I Want None Of It’, a slow and stately piano blues where Thom Yorke’s frail presence seems to have been requisitioned as a medium for the ghosts of both Mahalia and Robert Wyatt; Damien Rice clocks in with ‘Cross-Eyed Bear’ a sombre Tim Hardin threnody framed by hushed brushes and groaning cello, while Coldplay give us post-war thriller noir as Big Music in the form of ‘How You See The World No.2’.
There are the mavericks: Gorillaz’s ‘Hong Kong’ is a weird and wonderful Chinese pastoral composed of plucked zithers and windchimes, while The Go! Team try a new spin on the Pet Sounds/Spector orchestral with ‘Phantom Broadcast’.
Then there are the men who would be Peter Perrett. Babyshambles offer a flaccid ‘From Bollywood To Battersea’, but Razorlight are another story. On the evidence of Live 8 one of the few new acts with aspirations way above their station, their ‘Kirby’s House’ is a fine tune that erupts into a gospel coda exultant enough to have us gagging for the next album. Bloc Party too give up the goods: ‘The Present’ is an intriguing push and pull of taut rhythms, overwrought vocal and echoplexed guitar.
The rest is a la carte: quirky revivalists like The Coral, The Zutons and The Magic Numbers, the latter of whom seem bent on instigating a lonely Al Stewart revival. And there’s a slew of covers that veer from the painfully obvious (Keane owning up as indie Eltons essaying a trip-hop ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ with a little help from Faultine; the Kaiser Chiefs’ foolhardy ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’ which reproduces the original’s bass-line but little of the drama) to the downright bizarre (Boy George and Antony’s head-scratching, epiglottis-oscillating ‘Happy Christmas, War Is Over’).
Help! A Day In The Life may leave you elated and bamboozled by turns, but you won’t be bored. And with an option to buy tracks individually or in bulk, the punter gets to cherry-pick.
Log on, tune in, check it out… and cough up.
Available from www.warchildmusic.com
Pic: Robin Fry