War Child - Heroes

(Muso's Guide, March 11, 2009)

Album reviews

Everyone should buy Heroes. This isn’t an end-of-review spoiler, or a statement that affirms the bringing together of musical heavyweights such as Rufus Wainwright and Elbow can only go well. The main reason to buy Heroes is War Child, the charity behind the record.

Wait! Keep reading! The music bit comes soon! But this is important too! You should know that 66% of people who die in conflict are children, and War Child is a 16-year-old attempt to help protect them. No guilt-tripping, honest, but that surely has to be the best reason you’ve heard this year for parting with a tenner.

So, to the music… Heroes pulls no punches from the off, starting out with Beck and a version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’. A mist of fuzz rock guitar and a familiar Hansen vocal suffice to prove that Beck doing Dylan sounds a lot more like Beck than Dylan. Roxy Music may be upset to find that Scissor Sisters have buggered up ‘Do The Strand’ beyond recognition. Shrill and soulless, it is what can only be termed the ‘Comfortably Numb’ effect, and leaves Roxy fans gasping for breath with insult.

Critics’ choice TV On The Radio make a good fist of disturbing Bowie’s old bones with an electronica-heavy version of the titular ‘Heroes’, which owes more to Talking Heads than the Thin White Duke, as per most of their output. On the plus side, Franz Ferdinand taking on the angular might of Blondie’s ‘Call Me’ is a wet dream for anyone who hoped for a world where the perfect artrock splice might occur. Alex Kapranos approaches the whole thing with the air of a man who knows camp becomes him, and it does.

Or there’s Peaches pulling on her Iggy Pop suit for a right rumpus with the unfeasibly filthy ‘Search And Destroy’, smearing her scent on it like a stray cat. The accomplishment of the album is, on balance, fair. It offers a great opportunity to hear some irrefutably interesting music, and that is what being a fan is about. But regardless of what it sounds like, there can be no argument against buying this record at this time. Do it for the kids.