Weekly Music Roundup: The Charity Compilation "Help(2)", Aldous Harding, and Raye

This week, a charity compilation full of stars and surprises; the return of Aldous Harding; Conor Hanick rediscovers a lost masterpiece; and new works by Aukai and Raye. 

Help(2) Presents A Stunning Lineup of Singers and Songs

The charity compilation album Help came out in the mid-90s when the War Child organization asked Brian Eno to assemble the great and the good in UK music at the time. With Radiohead, Oasis, and Blur all contributing, it raised over a million pounds for War Child’s anti-war charity. Today, they released Help(2), an ambitious collection of artists from both sides of the Atlantic. The album has been keenly anticipated, and for the most part, it lives up to the hype, which is quite a feat. While many of the artists and bands contributed new songs, the strongest tracks might be the covers: Irish rockers Fontaines D.C. doing a deeply felt version of Sinead O’Connor’s “Black Boys On Mopeds,” for example, and Depeche Mode’s unexpected but appropriately relentless groove in Buffy Sainte-Marie’s classic “Universal Soldier.”  The album’s final track sees American pop star Olivia Rodrigo teaming up with Blur’s guitarist Graham Coxon for a wonderful version of “The Book Of Love,” written by Stephin Merritt for his band The Magnetic Fields. Rodrigo gets props for realizing that her airy vocals could bring something different from Merritt’s doleful baritone, but even more for her understated singing, especially in the choruses where her layered voices could’ve easily slipped into cheesy territory but instead stay true to Merritt’s wistful blend of melancholy and hope. 

Aldous Harding Is Still Weird

New Zealand singer/songwriter Aldous Harding has always gone her own way, from her early days making gothic folk music inspired by the Gormenghast fantasy trilogy to her more recent surrealist pop. (“The Barrel,” her biggest hit, features such classic lines as “show the ferret to the egg” – and some equally eccentric dancing in the accompanying video.) Her new single, “One Stop,” came out this week and is our first glimpse at what will be her fifth LP, to be called Train On The Island. The song is full of non sequiturs, although a couple of lines about meeting “the real John Cale” and packing the stage while he ate rice at least makes some kind of sense, however fictional the tale might be. The song rides along on a boogie-woogie piano riff, until its final minute when it abruptly turns into a guitar-led, almost Joni Mitchell-esque folk ballad. The video, meanwhile, sees Harding dancing again, sort of, inside a big metal tub. Reminds me of my favorite comment from her YouTube video for “The Barrell”: When Aldous dances like Aldous, she is "enigmatic" and "ethereal", but when I dance like Aldous I'm "perplexing" and "scaring the customers." 

Conor Hanick Rediscovers A Lost Masterpiece

In the early 1980s, the German composer and broadcaster Hans Otte wrote a set of twelve piano pieces called The Book of Sounds (Das Buch der Klänge). These pieces reflect Otte’s interest in Buddhism, the idea of “negative space,” and perhaps the nascent ambient music that Brian Eno was beginning to produce. But Otte was also a fan of the minimalist keyboard patterns of Philip Glass, and there may be just a hint of old German Romanticism in the lyrical phrasing of even the most repetitive and rhythmic moments. The Book Of Sounds was recorded by Otte in the mid-80s, and despite being a mainstay of our early New Sounds shows, it seemed destined to be one of those overlooked, idiosyncratic masterpieces that dot the history of music. Then came Conor Hanick, who fell in love with the work and began playing it, in its entirety, at music festivals like the 2022 Ojai Festival in California. Today, his studio recording came out, and with the benefit of forty years of hindsight (and a lot more virtuosity than Otte, who was not a professional pianist), Hanick really makes this set of works feel like a single narrative unfolding. This first part has two simple, alternating chords that then give way to a lovely swirl of repeating phrases. Both gestures, if not the actual notes within, return later in the piece. 

Aukai Gets Smaller, But Its Sound Doesn’t

Until now, Aukai has been a kind of ambient chamber music ensemble, led by composer Markus Sieber, who mostly plays the ronroco, a small South American lute. But the new LP, Chambers, is not chamber music at all – it is a studio creation in which Sieber plays all the instruments himself. And yet it is undeniably an Aukai recording – full of instrumental soundscapes that feel spacious, calm, a bit melancholic, and floating in time. Sieber’s music has always been cinematic, and in recent years he has in fact been doing some film work. This track, “Yobue,” evokes the landscape, and perhaps the long history, of the American Southwest; the video was actually filmed in San Mateo Acatitlán, Mexico. 

Raye’s Busy Week Includes A New Single

The British singer Raye, like Adele before her, makes new music that draws on vintage pop sounds of the 60s and 70s. She even looks the part, especially when she’s in front of an orchestra-sized band. Last week, she performed at the annual BRIT Awards (which she basically swept in 2024) and released “Nightingale Lane,” a ballad that reaches to the cheap seats with a grand, orchestral pop arrangement. It comes from her upcoming sophomore LP This Music May Contain Hope, out on March 27. Hopes of seeing her live, though, are faint for those who haven’t already acted – her entire North American tour, including Radio City Music Hall on April 15 and 16 – is sold out.