We need to bring back compilations. I mean, we won't. You can understand why we won't. Compilations are fully technologically obsolete, since streaming services turn everything into compilations. You no longer need to buy the soundtrack album for some movie that you'll never watch to hear 15 bands that you like and/or tolerate and/or are curious to check out and/or have never heard of. Also, compilations must be an almighty pain in the ass to coordinate. But when a compilation hits right, that's a glorious feeling. When you walk into a record store and you're like, "Wait, they're on it? And her? And these other two people, together?" And then you take it home and all the songs from disparate artists somehow work as a single listening experience? That's the stuff, baby.
Fundraising charity compilations can be self-important chores, but they don't have to be. You can really get people together for records like that. Individual songs can become events. Some of the songs on HELP(2), the latest benefit comp from the War Child organization, are events. For instance, HELP(2) has the first Arctic Monkeys song in four years, and also, at least according to rumor, possibly the last Arctic Monkeys song. It's got Arooj Aftab singing a heady, hazy Jeff Buckley cover with Beck and Jason Falkner backing her up. It's got Olivia Rodrigo singing a plaintive, lovely Magnetic Fields cover with Graham Coxon and Nic Harcourt backing her up. It's got a bunch of ascendant young festival acts pushing themselves to stand out, and it's got a bunch of longstanding festival-headliner veterans showing gravitas without settling into autopilot.
There's a precedent at work here, a legacy to live up to. HELP(2) is called HELP(2) because it's the sequel to The Help Album, a compilation that War Child put out in the peak Britpop moment of 1995. That thing is ridiculous. Virtually every major Britpop-moment character is on The Help Album. It's got the Stone Roses, Suede, Blur. There's an Oasis song with Johnny Depp on guitar and Kate Moss on tambourine, for some reason. There's a Charlatans/Chemical Brothers collab. Portishead and Massive Attack tracks appear back-to-back. The comp includes the first released version of Radiohead's "Lucky" and a one-off Paul McCartney/Noel Gallagher/Paul Weller supergroup chipping in with a version of "Come Together" that nobody needs. It's messy and absurd, and it captures a moment in time.
The Help Album had a concept: All the songs were supposed to be recorded in a single day. HELP(2) has a concept, too, though it's a little looser. The veteran producer and Simian Mobile Disco member James Ford took over Abbey Road for a little while late last year, and he brought in as many big-deal friends and acquaintances as he could summon. He could summon a lot, including a handful of returning HELP(1) veterans.
There are a few random outtakes on HELP(2) — a leftover Big Thief song from 2020, a Sampha track from 2022 — but they tend to be the ones that fade into the background. The real fun is in hearing something like Damon Albarn, Fontaines D.C. leader Grian Chatten, and slam-poet type Kae Tempest coming together for a random collaboration that, even more randomly, has people like Johnny Marr, Jarvis Cocker, English Teacher, the Libertines' Carl Barat, and Portishead's Adrian Utley in supporting roles.
Actually, maybe that's not the best example. Albarn et al's "Flags" is a perfectly solid mood-piece, but it gets a little Flimsy Steve, as so many chaotic Albarn-led all-star collaborations tend to do. Still, it's fun to think of so many of these people in the same studio at the same time, jumping in to help out on each others' sessions and doing their best to keep the mood communal and convivial. And once again, the end result captures a moment in time. We're not in the midst of some Britpop-style explosion right now, but when you hear some of the younger acts on HELP(2) – Black Country, New Road, Fontaines D.C., Wet Leg, the Last Dinner Party, token American Cameron Winter — you might mess around and convince yourself that there's some as-yet-unnamed thing going on. We already knew about the Windmill scene and the British/Irish post-punk revival of the past few years, but this feels potentially more sweeping and impactful and maybe even unified than that.
All those younger acts bring it, too. I was surprised to learn, for instance, that I like a Black Country, New Road song; the fluttery psych-folk of "Strangers" hits me harder than anything else I've heard from that band. Wet Leg's similarly strummy "Obvious" is one of the comp's random old songs — it dates back to 2020 — but it's far enough removed from the band's current sound that it feels exploratory in its own way. The Last Dinner Party's "Let's Do It Again!" is swoony, dramatic uptempo singalong with bouncy horn-stabs, and it reminds me of underrated Britpop B-listers like Sleeper. "Warning" is the first proper solo Cameron Winter song since his Heavy Metal album, and his dead-eyed nasal howl finds its equal in the track's hyper-tense Kronos Quartet-ass strings. With the eyes of the world on him, Winter is making some true freak shit.
On the album's tracklist, Winter's "Warning" directly follows Fontaines D.C.'s take on Sinéad O'Connor's "Black Boys On Mopeds," a protest song that has lost none of its sting in the past 35 years. (Sinéad O'Connor, it's worth mentioning, was on the first Help Album, covering Bobbie Gentry's "Ode To Billie Joe.") Simply by restating the sad, righteous fury of O'Connor's original and adding in a discordant string section of their own, Fontaines D.C. have made a powerful tribute to O'Connor, an artist who did not live to see her protest addressed.
We should take a moment for all the covers on HELP(2). There are a lot of them, and they're all impeccably chosen. Portishead's Beth Gibbons, a HELP(1) holdover, sings the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning" as a beatific hymn that brings some of the original song's fragility to the fore. Arooj Aftab and Beck reinvent Jeff Buckley's "Lilac Wine" as a witchy cocktail-jazz incantation, a torch song that could be delivered by torchlight. Depeche Mode render another protest song, Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Universal Soldier," as synthetic stomp-snarl goth-pomp that would've kicked ass on the Universal Soldier soundtrack. They make it sound like a Depeche Mode song, and it makes the transition better than you might expect. Dave Gahan, remember, has been delivering ponderous lyrics that he didn't write for decades. He knows how to sell that stuff. I'm not sure who really needed Beabadoobee to cover Elliott Smith, but her take on "Say Yes" caught me by surprise, so maybe I'm the one who needed it.
And then there's the Olivia Rodrigo factor. Rodrigo is one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. If you wanted to be cynical, you could say that the mere act of covering the Magnetic Fields' "The Book Of Love" is her attempt to further ingratiate herself to the aging rock critics who hold her up as a young exemplar, another gesture of gen-X goodwill on par with trotting out Robert Smith and David Byrne onstage at festivals. And sure, I feel slightly corny endorsing another one of the things that she seemingly did to pander to me specifically. But holy motherfuck, she really kills that cover. The whole deal with 69 Love Songs is that it's Stephin Merritt's faux-cynical attempt to turn himself into a pop-song factory, to manufacture sincerity on demand. If a giant pop star can take one of his disingenuous meaning-machines and sing it with grace and feeling and power, then maybe that song has finally reached its logical end-point.
If HELP(2) were made up entirely of covers, I wouldn't be upset. Some of the originals can blur into each other, but that's what happens with compilation albums. Not every song can be a standout. But even the tracks that don't grab me percolate pleasantly in the background; I haven't lunged for the skip button once while working on this review. With James Ford producing many of these tracks at Abbey Road, and with many musicians helping out on multiple tracks, the comp gains a rare cohesiveness. It also sets us up for an out-of-nowhere moment like Pulp's skronk-attack "Begging For Change."
Pulp were the only one of Britpop's Big Four who didn't appear on HELP(1), and they make up for that oversight here. (Incidentally War Child UK just announced that Oasis' live version of "Acquiesce," recorded at a Wembley Stadium reunion show, will be a HELP(2) bonus track. Factoring in the Damon Albarn song and multiple Graham Coxon appearances, that means the only Big Four band missing this time is Suede.) On "Begging For Change," Pulp abandon the smooth grandeur of their recent reunion album More to make a psychedelic post-punk rager about the endless hamster wheel of consumerism. It's like Pulp making their own King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard song, or maybe it's a flashback to their pre-Britpop days as indie stalwarts who couldn't catch a break. Either way, I'm into it.
There's more to like about HELP(2), too: Arlo Parks in dazed reverie mode, Young Fathers in angry motorik mode, Sampha in dazed motorik mode. Anna Calvi's "Sunday Light" is basically a UK indie singer-songwriter posse cut with Nilüfer Yanya, Dove Ellis, and Wolf Alice's Ellie Rowsell, and all of those voices combine into something vast and cinematic. Bat For Lashes' "Carry My Girl" is a beautiful, sweeping, elegiac lament about trying to raise a kid in a world where you know that kids die for nothing, that so many mothers will be forced to experience levels of pain that you're only now beginning to comprehend. It ends with Natasha Khan singing that "they're all our babies" again and again. It really pounds the album's entire point home.
As a charity, War Child works to aid and protect kids in conflict zones. That's the mission. I have tried not to address the cause that HELP(2) exists to support, since it's so easy to falsely conflate good intentions with good music. But in the time that I've been working on this review, the United States and Israel have launched an unprovoked attack on Iran, murdering more innocent kids. The compilation will come out mere days after an American missile attack on a girls' elementary school killed well over 100 kids, an absolutely devastating and pointless act of violence that's shocking even in these banally evil times. You're not going to change this unbelievably fucked up state of affairs by buying a copy of HELP(2), but some of these songs hit a little harder than they did before this past weekend.
HELP(2) is out 3/6 on War Child Records. Pre-order it here.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Harry Styles' Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally
• Bonnie "Prince" Billy's We Are Together Again
• The Scythe's Strictly 4 The Scythe
• Shabaka's Of The Earth
• Bitter Branches' Let’s Give The Land Back To The Animals
• Bosse-de-Nage's Hidden Fires Burn Hottest
• Arima Ederra's A Rush To Nowhere
• Doll Spirit Vessel's Bow
• New Age Doom & H.R.'s Angels Against Angels
• Temple Of Void's The Crawl
• waterbaby's Memory Be A Blade
• Nova One's how to kiss
• Tanya Tagaq's Saputjiji
• Squeeze's Trixies
• Rosenau & Sanborn's Two
• Cobrah's Torn
• World I Hate's Total Nuclear Annihilation
• Hater's Mosquito
• Gum's Blue Gum Way
• Bory's Never Turns To Night
• VIAL's HELLHOUND
• Gregory Uhlmann's Extra Stars
• Surfbort's Reality Star
• Charlie Puth's Whatever’s Clever!
• Joshua Idehen's I Know You’re Hurting, Everyone Is Hurting, Everyone Is Trying, You Have Got To Try
• Natalie Jane Hill's Hopeful Woman
• The Brook & The Bluff's Werewolf
• Aukai's Chambers
• Austin Michael's Lonestar
• The Delines' The Set Up
• Murkage Dave's Brut Thoughts
• Human Potential's Eel Sparkles
• House Of All's Inkling
• Soreab's CU
• Marlon Magnée's Dark Star
• Froglord's Lower & Slower - Vol.1
• Book Of Churches' Book Of Churches
• Mute Swan's Skin Slip
• Hunter Hayes' Evergreen
• Status/Non-Status' Big Changes
• Endearments' An Always Open Door
• Los Frankies' D.E.D. City
• Solya's Queen Of Texas
• Field Commander Ali's The Next From Field Commander
• Melodi Ghazal's Idol Melodies
• Alex Melton's The Process
• Katelyn Tarver's Tell Me How You Really Feel
• Those Who Walk Away's Afterlife Requiem
• Walter Smith III's Twio, Vol. 2
• Tomu DJ's antagonist
• Travis Bolt's Burning Bridges
• Sons Of Town Hall's Of Ghosts And Gods
• Scout Gillett's Tough Touch
• OHYUNG's IOWA
• Jon von Boehm's Reflections
• Lost Society's Hell Is A State Of Mind
• Teerath Majumder's Dust To Dust
• Melin Melyn's Mill On The Hill: After Dark
• The Gold Tips' Hope And Recreation
• Mary Middlefield's Will You Take Me As I Am?
• Yebba's Jean
• Deloyd Elze's Nellene
• King Youngblood's Afrothunda II - All of Us Over Our Heads
• clust.r's autumn break down
• Willa Ford's amanda
• Morrissey's Make-Up Is A Lie
• Gnarls Barkley's Atlanta
• The Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man soundtrack
• Various artists' Scribble Benefit CompilationPicking Stones
• The Late Night Tales: Barry Can't Swim DJ mix
• Amalie Dahl's Dafnie EXTENDED's Live At Moldejazz
• Vundabar’s Surgery And Pleasure (Deluxe)
• The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus' X's For Eyes (Deluxe)
• MORGXN's HEARTLAND (Deluxe)
• Daniel Avery's Tremor (Midnight Versions)
• Talking Heads' Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live
• MODESELEKTOR's Classics Vol. 1
• Godsmack's Awake (25th Anniversary Edition)
• Ted Lucas' Images Of Life box set
• Flying Lotus' Big Mama EP
• The S.E.T.'s Self Evident Truth EP
• Bedelia's Never change, love you always EP
• 2D0GS' ALL THE D0GS ARE BARKING EP
• Snowcuffs' Sweet Gravity EP
• Slag's Losing EP
• Powerwasher's Pressure EP
• Dutch Interior's It’s Glass EP
• Marlon Funaki's Half Moon EP
• ZOCO's LUMANISTA I EP
