In her 76 years, Yoko Ono has been forced to lead a series of double lives-- as a mother and celebrity activist; as esteemed avant-garde/proto-punk icon and reviled Beatles breaker-upper; as a still-active conceptual artist and administrative gatekeeper to one of the most lucrative pop-song catalogues in the world. And this month, all those lives are playing out simultaneously-- it's either extremely fortuitous or unfortunate timing that Ono's first album of all-new material in nine years arrives in the wake of the 09-09-09 Beatles bonanza (in which, regrettably, she has once again been cast as the villain).
But while the rest of the world straps on video-game gizmos and pretends to be John Lennon, Ono is resurrecting her late husband's spirit through a much-more subtle gesture-- by crediting her new album to the group they debuted onstage in Toronto 40 years ago this month, the Plastic Ono Band. Of course, the Plastic Ono Band was always more a collaborative concept than a solidified band line-up; it's not like the name's appearance on the cover of Between My Head and the Sky portends the return of Eric Clapton or Ringo Starr to the fold. But the new Plastic Ono Band stays true to the original's loose, friends-and-family vibe, recruiting son Sean Ono Lennon, his former partner Yuka Honda (ex-Cibo Matto), and fellow Japanese art-pop maverick Cornelius, among others. And after a series of releases (2007's Yes, I'm a Witch and Open Your Box) that updated Ono's signature songs with help from the many artists she's influenced (Cat Power, Le Tigre), the reclamation of the Plastic Ono Band name-- and specifically, its exploratory aesthetic-- signals that Ono is ready to plow forward once again.
Opener "Waiting for the D Train" wastes no time getting the wheels in motion, with Yoko's echo-drenched squeals driving a berserker garage-rock rhythm that's less about the mundane feeling of waiting for a subway car than the giddily dangerous sensation of riding it off the rails. That same night-in-Manhattan energy manifests itself in a decidedly different manner on the LCD-like electro-disco workout "The Sun Is Down", contrasting Ono's monotone title mantra with layers of huffing and puffing vocal tics that evoke the carnal, animalistic promise of the moonlight. Completing the album's solid opening trifecta is "Ask the Elephant", a slice of sax-squawked absurdist funk that showcases the percussive quality of Ono's voice, recalling the heady, hypno-grooves of 1971's incomparable Fly.
But Between My Head and the Sky becomes a bit of a muddle in the middle, with Plastic Ono Band's free-form approach yielding less satisfying results. And the tracklist momentum gets tripped by the fact that some songs feel like rough sketches for the ones that immediately follow: while the aquatic sound effects and wordless, orgasmic coos of "Moving Mountains" provide little in the way of payoff, the same devices are put to more effective use in the Krautrockin' "Calling". And if the mid-tempo, reggaefied exercise "Hashire, Hashire" doesn't get interesting until starts Ono unleashing her creepy, crying wails in the final minute, the ensuing title track picks up on that cue, placing those unsettling sounds atop a tough porno-funk groove, and coming on like Serge Gainsbourg's Historie De Melody Nelson by way of The Exorcist.
Between My Head and the Sky simmers down considerably in its closing third, shifting away from boisterous band jams toward meditative tone poems and piano pieces. The album's longest song is its most serene-- "Feel the Sand", a ripple of acoustic oscillations that aren't too many campfires removed from Animal Collective's Sung Tongs-- but also its most trite, with Yoko dispensing a stream of New Agey eco-slogans ("listen to the sound of the planet") like a yoga instructor. More affecting is the album's closing string of piano ballads, which preach a similar ideal of universal love, but from the mournful perspective of someone who's spent many years of her life fighting for it and then suddenly dealing with its absence. Were it not for the fact that she's just recently launched her own label (Chimera Music), you'd think Ono had planned "I'm Going Away Smiling" as her career send-off, a beautifully desolate I-will-survive serenade that deserves to become a drag-queen diva standard for years to come. But if this song and its equally bittersweet successor "Higa Noburu" suggest Ono's writing her own epitaph, the album's extremely brief final track tells a different story: amid 20 seconds of destructive sledge-hammering sounds, Ono cheerfully declares, "It's me, I'm alive." Only someone who's lived lives like hers could make such plain and simple words sound so defiant.
