** VARIOUS ARTISTS,”What’s That I Hear?--The Songs of Phil Ochs”, Sliced Bread

In his liner essay, Dave Cohen notes that Ochs’ songs have been recorded by performers ranging from Anita Bryant to Jello Biafra. Though the former stands as unintentional camp, the latter shows the enduring reach of the ‘60s singer-activist’s didactic attack and poetic grace long after his 1975 suicide. Such post-punk polemicists as Rage Against the Machine and the Mekons sit on an equal branch of the Ochs lineage as that of the post-coffeehouse troubadours.

But it’s only the folkie element--including both Ochs contemporaries (Tom Paxton, Dave Van Ronk) and latter-day acolytes (John Wesley Harding, Billy Bragg)--that is celebrated on this two-CD tribute set, an outgrowth of “Phil Ochs Song Night” concert events held by the artist’s sister, Sonny. Bragg and Sid Griffin team on a twangy “Sailors and Soldiers,” the Roches harmonize exquisitely on Ochs’ setting of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells” and Arlo Guthrie pours antiwar passion into “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” But as a whole, it sells Ochs’ legacy short.

Too often the performers treat the songs as sacred texts rather than the living, breathing and barbed calls to action and empathy of the originals, heard in last year’s comprehensive anthology “Farewells & Fantasies.” Rarely do the political and personal struggles that made Ochs so compellingly vital color these performances.