Yoko Ono: Take Me to the Land of Hell (2013)

(Chimera)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

For four wonderfully exhausting minutes near the end of Take Me to the Land of Hell, Yoko Ono's finest album in around thirty years, the composer-producer-singer and her loosely constructed Plastic Ono Band weave and crawl and hop through one of the more unstoppable new wave grooves laid down in recent memory, a track so blazing and relentless that you'd think Ono, who is currently eighty years old, would need to shout to be heard above it. Instead, she's one with it -- she yells and sings and smiles and dances along -- because she's unmistakably in control of it. When it ends, quite suddenly, one gets the distinct impression that the listener, who's inevitably been dancing or at least wanting to dance, is more out of breath after its frenzy than Yoko Ono.

That there are people who placed Paul McCartney's decently polite New on their list of the best records of the year but didn't even bother listening to Ono's LP is one of the many injustices associated with the career of one of the best and wittiest artists of the last century. One wouldn't wish to deny Ono and John Lennon their obviously deep and rewarding life together in retrospect, but bear with me for a moment: imagine if Ono had no Beatles association (and don't make the empty argument that she therefore wouldn't have a recording career; that's trite, and it's nonsense). Not only would there be no reason to feel grim when comparing her sales figures to a series of BBC performances that bootleg-savvy fans have had for years, one assumes that Land of Hell, like its excellent 2009 predecessor Between My Head and the Sky, wouldn't have to fight any rockist prejudices to gain attention.

Because this is a truly staggering, almost overwhelmingly delightful album. I spend most of it with my hands going all over my face because I just can't fucking believe how brilliant, how popping and full of life, how clever and funny and emotionally frank it is. I dug Dylan, Bowie and Leonard Cohen's latest works, but this roundly shames them all. No one in Ono's peer group, maybe no one period, has better instincts, better restraint and well-placed absence thereof, and (certainly) a greater sense of fun and discovery.

When most veteran artists show up with a record full of illustriously cool guest stars, it's a pandering comeback move. Land of Hell is packed to the gills with folks who are perhaps not superstars but are certainly big names to probably anyone reading this blog: ?uestlove, Mike D and Ad-Rock, Nels Cline, Lenny Kravitz (!), Keigo Oyamada, and in one of the true musical coups of the era, Merrill Garbus, an artist who with tUnE-yArDs has arguably taken up and run with Ono's ideas in a manner deeper yet than bands like the B-52's did during the '70s. This is all arranged, unsurprisingly, by Ono's son Sean Lennon, who also makes immeasurable contributions to the record in a subtle but moving continued act of collaboration. The thing is that all of these musicians, Lennon included, keep themselves deliberately in the background -- they are here not to make their presences obvious or to help Ono's label bank on their name recognition, but because they want to work with Ono and believe in the potential greatness of the finished project.

They know as well as we do that Ono is still relevant, still unstoppable, with a violent creativity unsullied by her decades of previous work and impassioned expression. The songs are varied, firing out with unique pleasures and aspects of her gift: "Cheshire Cat Cry" is a hyperactive chant on peace, the tUnE-yArDs collaboration "Tabetai" an eerie vocal exercise, "Little Boy Blue Your Daddy's Gone" is sheer anguish, "N.Y. Noodle Town" just as amusing and eccentric as its title. The most immediate songs aim for the dance floor: "Moonbeams" takes Ono's poetic lyrics into a searing movement of trance and zoned-out electronics, and the instant classic "Bad Dancer" celebrates the human body and its contorted iterations as well as any pop song. Better yet, the fiercely funked-out "7th Floor" defines Ono's coy fascination with the mixture of the familiar with the otherworldly -- and again, is so breezy and full of life you can't believe you're hearing it in 2013.

Land of Hell's broadest pleasure comes from Ono's vocals. Though always an underrated and distinctive singer, whose fascination with the emotionally fraught sounds of her upper register opened doors for a later generation of female singers from Cindy Wilson to Elizabeth Fraser to Björk, she has found on her recent records a giddy nuance in her often spoken delivery that suggests the half-smiling charm-spill of Fred Astaire in an old musical far more than any straightforward pop star. When she casually shoots off about the elevator being too slow or how bad a dancer she is or how you can come to her when you need to talk, it's an extension of her avant garde work specifically because it's so disarming -- she seems to be your pal Yoko Ono, just chatting with you on a slow day, but she also hams for the mic like every spotlight in the room has zeroed in on her. She's Nico and Lou Reed in a single being.

Ballads can be a sticking point for so restless a performer as Ono, but she makes them interesting; "There's No Goodbye Between Us" and "Leaving Tim" are especially remarkable, showcasing Ono's underrated gift for melody and capturing moods that are by no means simplistic -- there's even a sideways cackle here and there. They're tremendously emotional songs, but so is every last song, every last moment on this record. When it ends, you can't believe it's over already; it's a party, a transcendent document of absolute joy and the full extent of a person who still cares, is still restless, still believes no matter what. Everything about it feels new, fresh, surprising. But it shouldn't surprise us, really. Take Me to the Land of Hell is a playful, crafty, tireless work of rock & roll mastery by a serious artist operating at her peak.