Yoko Ono: Plastic Ono Band [SECRETLY CANADIAN]

Why you'll love it

Secretly Canadian's reissue comes in a tip-on jacket with a booklet, a poster and a download with four bonus tracks. John Lennon, Ringo Starr and Klaus Voormann play on it, and "AOS" comes from a 1968 rehearsal with Ornette Coleman for a show at the Albert Hall.

This edition

• Tip-on jacket
• Booklet included
• Poster included
• Download card with bonus tracks
• Lyrics included

About the album

John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album gets most of the attention, but it had a twin. Lennon and Yoko Ono made their solo albums side by side at Abbey Road in September and October 1970, with the same band, and the two came out together that December.

Where his record turned inward, hers went out on a limb. "Why" opens with Lennon's guitar howling against Ono's voice, "Greenfield Morning I Pushed An Empty Baby Carriage All Over The City" loops and churns, and "Touch Me" and "Paper Shoes" ride the rhythm section deep into the unknown. Lennon and Ono produced it together, and it sounds like nothing else that came out of those sessions.

Sean Lennon was among the executive producers of this reissue, and the album's influence runs through decades of noise and art rock. Side B ends in a locked groove, so the record keeps going until you get up and stop it, which feels very much in the spirit of the thing. Ono had been making conceptual art in London and New York for years, and this album carried that fearless approach into a rock studio.

Also at Kops: more Yoko Ono on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Apple / Secretly Canadian / Chimera Music (cat# SC281), a reissue of the 1970 album.