The more I listen to Conny Ochs, the more I like him and his work. The honesty and directness of his songs are integral to the appeal, but there’s so much more. Time and again, he achieves the same feat as the album’s opening track, ‘Hole’, which has a light tone but tinged with melancholy. His guitar playing is so emotionally intuitive, it’s phenomenal. A key change consisting of a single chord casts shadows and evokes new emotive pangs as if from nowhere.
And while his material is predominantly acoustic, he’s still rocks out when the mood takes. Sure, ‘Piece of Heaven’ is restrained on many levels, but as a stripped-back rock song, it’s still got grit and drive, and the urgent percussion and chugging electric guitar pulses with life and energy.
In many ways, this is important, in that Ochs doesn’t sound like a rock musician ‘doing’ acoustic, and slides between styles with consummate ease. Ochs can do the way cool rock ‘n’ roll swagger, and dirty broken-down blues and paired down grunge anthem, and pull them all off with equal style. The slow country of ‘Slide’ is powerfully dark, courtesy of some crashing chords, but then Ochs immediately flips the mood with the uptempo ‘No Easy way’, which shows he’s not averse to treading the perimeters of pop.
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What Ochs mostly gives us, though, is thoughtful, sincere songs brimming with heart and soul, and ‘Future Fables’ has all the makings of a future classic.
Conny Ochs Online
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