Yoko Ono turned 80 this year, but on Take Me to the Land of Hell she barely sounds out of her 20s. This is another album billed to the Plastic Ono Band following the revival of that name with 2009's excellent Between My Head and the Sky, although the lineup remains thrillingly fluid. We get a return of sorts of Beastie Boys Mike D and Ad-Rock, plus supplementary work from tUnE-yArDs, Nels Cline, and ?uestlove among others. There's even room for Lenny Kravitz. Steering the ship alongside Ono are Sean Lennon, Cornelius, and Cibo Matto's Yuka Honda, with the latter clearly exerting a strong influence over the blaze of color that streaks through its 13 songs. Honda and Ono are a great match, both clearly in love with bringing whimsical touches to their music, both enviably adept at bridging the divide between the sublime and the ridiculous.
Take Me to the Land of Hell is unmistakably a party album, albeit one pierced by familiar anti-war and pro-peace fascinations. Ono's nothing if not consistent, leaving little doubt about her motivations throughout, principally because she spends a decent amount of time demonstrating how she cares little for the vagaries of metaphor. "Bad Dancer" is simply about how she's a bad dancer, something that causes her to collapse into giggles at one point. The track times are often brief, causing the songs to resemble little insights into Ono's thought process, delivered with the saddened glow of a torch singer ("There's No Goodbye Between Us") or diverting into spoken-word passages strung across raging, Zappa-style funk workouts ("7th Floor"). Sometimes all those tendencies get mixed up into one song; "Cheshire Cat Cry" is a standout, full of stop-the-violence lyrics, big soloing (presumably from Lennon), and spiraling 70s Moog twists.
The sheer amount of guests and musical digressions makes the overall focus blur on occasion-- the thumpingly trad guitar grind of "N.Y. Noodle Town" causes the buildup of energy to dissipate drastically, but there's a more considered and quite beautiful comedown moment in the string-laden title track that follows. Something this record does a little better than Between My Head and the Sky is show off Ono the musical omnivore, shifting across multiple disciplines, demonstrating how divergent universes are not quite so different after all. There are showtunes melting into trip-hop then segueing into avant rock. In Ono's world there are no boundaries between styles, just natural pathways leading from one to the other. There's a ton of cultural clutter here, but in a sense there ought to be. After spending so long hoovering up the arts, Ono spits it all out in a glorious mess, leaving her listeners to sift through the debris.
Like most records that lack a central stylistic thrust, Take Me to the Land of Hell often resembles a great collection of tracks instead of a coherent overall work. Indeed, this album was premiered track-by-track on Ono's website prior to its release, which suggests that someone behind it felt some hand-holding was necessary instead of dumping the whole album out at once. It takes an effort to reach the spot where it sinks in as an overarching piece, but that ties back to more challenging Ono musical projects, where time and patience are key elements in the listening process. For "Moonbeams" she even gets her wail on, making it ache as hard as the spread of a dull blue bruise. It's there that Ono still performs most effectively, using tone and gesture to say far more than most of her straight "message" songs. In among the ebullient atmosphere of this record, there's a voice in there that says: "I hurt, too."
