It is a sort of rule that second volumes of anything rarely rise to the same standard of the first. But there are always exceptions, Mad Max II and The Two Towers being two such, and here we have another. Far Rockaway, Odgers and Kettle’s first set of Ochs songs, conceived in 2020, released in 2024, was very, very good, but this is better. Effectively, the first was their favourites, making for a sometimes disparate listen. Here the focus is more acute and focussed. The clue is in the name, these all being songs relating to war and the aftermath. As we sit nervously on the brink of the next, never have these songs seemed so prescient.
Once again the format is simple, with few bells and whistles. Voices and acoustic guitars make for the main soundscape, with the songs, the lyrics and melodic construction, granted all the more room to shine. That said, such is the quality of the playing that each of these ten lilies get a good gilding. If you know Odgers from the hoarse gravel gargling of The Men They Couldn’t Hang, his honeyed croon here may take you by surprise. Indeed, comparisons with the timbre and depth of Ralph McTell came unbidden at several points. And Kettle seems to effortlessly rattle off the sort of fluid instrumental polish, on guitar, banjo and mandolin, that might have you listening again, and more carefully, to his work with Merry Hell. Add in the sterling rhythmic punch of stand up bass, also Kettle, and it’s perfect.
‘Automation Song’ lets you in gently, a relative outlier in the writer’s canon, a song that belies it being written 62 years ago. And, if it isn’t overtly about war, it certainly sets the scene for the sort of discouraged and disgruntled workforce that feeds insecurity. More sparsely arranged than the songs that follow, it is in the door and sitting down on your sofa before you fully realise. Which is the precise moment it nails you, as the gaunt and haunting litany of ‘I Ain’t Marching Any More’ leaps out. An exquisite narrative around the recurring futility we seem destined always to repeat, Odgers sings with a mix of passion and, oddly, dispassion, a saddened historian with a knowledge of where the dead are buried. It’s superb.
‘The War Is Over’ is gifted with a sense of energetic propulsion that, for possibly the only time, harks back to his day job, and it would love to hear the full band of TMTCH tackle this one. Clarity is essential to capture all the weaving wordplay that Ochs so excelled at, and not a syllable is lost or swallowed. Some gorgeous picking by Kettle sets the tone for the delicacy of a serving man’s lament, ‘Celia’. A fine solo then tugs harder still on the already wracked heartstrings. How can a song unfamiliar relate so resoundingly with the human condition? If the Ochs songbook doesn’t now get a revival in the sessions and clubs, I’ll be very surprised.
The lyrics of ‘Remember Me’ roll along with such the sort of quiet desperation as to have you wishing for the return of communal singing, in primary schools, a song that should be sung in assembly, daily, if assembly even happens these days. As it ends and the even more tormented ‘When I’m Gone’ begins, that wish becomes personal ambition, a zeal to sing it personally at the very next opportunity, after hours at a festival. Sure, it’ll probably never happen, but, in the moment, you want it to. Odgers sounds possessed by a disapproving wraith, possibly even by Ochs himself. A lithe burst of harmonica, mid song, acts as a lonesome last post.
‘I’m Tired’ is accapella, just Odgers, barely a minute and a half of the sort of exhausted anguish that led Ochs to his end. Stopping suddenly in suspended air, it is a good moment to reflect, ahead the 7 minute ‘Joe Hill’, as something may now be in your eye. Not the older song, ‘(I Dreamed of) Joe Hill’, this Dylanesque epic has you questioning why we don’t call Dylan Ochsesque more often. A more plangent version that Billy Bragg’s, who has covered actually both songs, it is a warmer and more affectionate take.
I guess that ‘What Are You Fighting For’ is the best known song, or at least title, here. But how well do you know the lyric? I found I didn’t much at all but would suggest you remedy any similar deficiency. Once more Kettle throws in all manner of rippling accompaniment, and this swiftly becomes the new most important song on the record thus far, with content and challenges never more relevant. But that lasts for next to no time at all, such is the savage cushioned assault of ‘No More Songs’, Ochs’ bleak masterpiece of despair. ‘Hello, hello, is anybody home…………’
This is an astonishing record and took me completely by surprise, even with the knowledge of the first. If Odgers and Kettle don’t have you googling to see if CND is still a thing, you haven’t a heart. (It is, btw.) And if you don’t now see Ochs as one of the 20th century’s finest minstrels, you haven’t a head.
Seuras Og
Artists’ website: www.philodgers.bandcamp.com
‘The War Is Over’ – official video:
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