Various (War Child): Help

As I bought this two and a half years after it came out, and paid only £1.99 (Fopp), I fear none of my money went to the charity that organised the whole thing. Sorry.

I suspect I bought it on the back of reading about the album's production in Brian Eno's diary for 1995. His entry for 5th September reads,

Tapes appearing from everywhere, me trying to keep some mental track of it [the idea was to have all the artists record their songs on the same day, and I believe that was achieved]. Everything that comes in sounds good: no duds. The Radiohead song is meltingly beautiful.

I pay attention when Eno says something is meltingly beautiful, but I find the Radiohead song overwrought. It remains the only song of theirs I own (and, no, I never downloaded In Rainbows, free, peer-to-peer, or otherwise).

From the perspective of 2009, I have to say it sounds like pretty much all duds to me. God, the mid-nineties were a dire time. Possible exceptions? Well, you can always rely on Sinéad O'Connor, and her voice plus a Bobbie Gentry song could hardly go wrong. Terry Hall's song starts well. Blur's seemed to have some humour to it, but that's track 19, and I was losing the will to listen by then.

MusicBrainz entry for this album Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Listen to this album in part at Last.fm Listen to this album in full at We7