Help: A Day In The Life (Part 2)

12. Hard-Fi - Help Me Please
I maybe wouldn't have been as likely to give Hard-Fi's album much of a chance if my girlfriend wasn't such a huge fan of them but I'm glad that I did as it's full of excellent pop songs and lyrics which work better than expected. Slower songs don't tend to be their thing though, and this is the slowest and most melancholy of all ('so many tears','being alone scares the life out of me'). Despite occasionally sounding like Oasis it is honest and simple enough to work pretty well though.

13. Belle & Sebastian - The Eighth Station Of The Cross Kebab House
Somehow I can't believe that eighth is spelt like that, but apparently so. Carrying on where the mostly brilliant Dear Catastrophe Waitress left off, this is gloriously instant and catchy, but it also adds a political edge here more blatantly than Elbow do, with lyrics about Israel, although they don't seem to take any side particularly strongly. The last line is absolutely brilliant, particularly in referencing Coldplay, a band who are now on this compilation.

14. Tinariwen - Cler Achel
Again, a little outside of what I would normally listen to, and doesn't seem to do much for me; pleasant background music but I prefer Emmanuel Jal.

15. George And Anthony - Happy Christmas, War Is Over
Everything about this is almost compellingly awful! I have heard a few Anthony And The Johnsons songs and while I thought that the arrangements sounded great and the lyrics ok, I still couldn't bring myself to like them because of that voice. To me it just sounds like someone doing a really bad Buckley impression. Even if I were to enjoy it I can't imagine finding this anything other than hilariously bad though, a nasty saccharine arrangement of a far from brilliant song with totally misplaced voices.

16. Gorillaz - Hong Kong
Firstly, calling this a Gorillaz song is slightly questionable because it seems to bear no relation to any of their other stuff and to be virtually be a Damon Albarn solo song, or in fact is closer to Blur's Out Of Time relocated from Morocco to Hong Kong than anything. With that out of the way, this can be praised totally as the most gorgeous thing on here by some way, 7 minutes of bliss.

17. Babyshambles - From Bollywood To Battersea
Trying to ignore Pete's other activities is pretty hard nowadays, but at least this doesn't actually sound like it must have been recorded by a total waster like Fuck Forever. Instead it ambles along pleasantly for a few minutes like a lesser acoustic Libertines song, which is something at least I guess.

18. Manic Street Preachers - Leviathan
A unintelligable talking bit at the start and a big riff, must be a new Manics song! Not exactly the most punk thing they've recorded in ages as they've claimed, it sounds like the kind of agressive but unremarkable song that they can probably knock out in their sleep, before puzzlingly fading out just as it gets going.

19. Razorlight - Kirby's House
Razorlight tend to veer very easily from likable to completely terrible as far as I'm concerned. This stays just about on the likable side, laregly steering clear on pomposity even in the 'epic' ending.

20. Damien Rice - Cross-Eyed Bear
What, not Damien Rice And Lisa Hannigan? I thought that their move to more correct crediting on the last single would be a permanent one, and on the basis of this it definitely should be, with Damien becoming increasingly hopelessly mired in MOR and the moment when Lisa starts singing being the best by far. Damien also seems to be sounding unusually gruff, perhaps in an attempt to further distinguish himself from James Blunt. Any hopes that I might have had for his/their second album have now pretty much totally disappeared in the three-year farce that has been the O promotional campaign (and most annoyingly of all, it's worked).

21. Mylo - Mars Needs Women
The tracklisting to this largely appears to have been decided at random, but putting this straight after Damien Rice is a brilliant move, making it sound twice as exciting, shiny and modern as it actually is.

22. Coldplay - How You See The World Part 2
Ah, Coldplay. I think, with my getting invited to secret gigs and having thousands of posts on their forum and all, on top of their status as The Biggest Band In The World™ and resultant omnipresence, that it's increasingly difficult to think about their music without getting completely lost in too much baggage. I can try though.
This is another political song: 'You put the world in a tin can, black market contraband, and it hurt just a little bit, when they sliced and packaged it' this starts, and it sounds like a more direct and angry cousin of X&Y's closer Twisted Logic. Chris Martin has never been technically the best lyricist but these days his love songs have started sounding more and more trite (check out A Message or Swallowed In The Sea) and the angrier he is the more brilliant they sound. Somewhat surprsingly it never sounds too simplistic, perhaps as confused despair is a pretty reasonable feeling to have.
It's a shame that this song is thrown away in such a manner though, and it further enforces the idea of X&Y as a compromise between what Coldplay wanted and what they imagined that people wanted. Apparently Twisted Logic almost didn't make it on as well.