Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Lennon's Dark Hour
Hard upon the break up of the Beatles and fresh from Primal Scream Therapy, John Lennon returns to the studio to produce his first and greatest post-Beatles album. Honest, uninhibited, musically minimalist, lyrically laconic, and emotionally dark, Lennon's *Plastic Ono* band haunts you in a way that no other album can. This is the standard in rock and roll melancholia, the first album in which a major artist openly expresses the full extent of inner pain throughout. From the opening funeral bell of "Mother" to the frail "three-blind mice" lament of "My Mummy's Dead," Lennon masterfully sounds the inner depths of emotional trauma and existential despair. "Hold On" is the most upbeat song on the album, and even it is sprinkled with doubt and longing. "Working Class Hero," "Mother," "God," "Isolation," and "I Found Out" all serve as studies in inward collapse as Lennon draws us beyond the event horizon of the brittle self and into the black hole of dispirited agony. Lennon's darker Beatles songs (e.g. - "I'm So Tired," "Run For Your Life," "Help,"), while of the highest musical and lyrical quality - and in some ways superior to "Plastic Ono Band" as individual examples of Beatles artistry, only hint at where Lennon takes us emotionally in these songs. Lennon guides us into the void, but not by "lay[ing] down all thought," but through laying the heart bare. As a study in the rawness human pain, no album surpasses this one, and this album set a precedent that would be followed by similar powerful works such as Neil Young's *Tonight's the Night*, Bob Dylan's *Blood on the Tracks*, Pink Floyd's *The Wall*, Bruce Springsteen's *Nebraska*, and REM's *Automatic for the People* (although the latter title only fits in with these others in part). All of these albums are great, and I strongly recommend each of them, but they all look to Lennon's *Plastic Ono Band* as the seminal rock exploration of personal struggle.Highly recommended.
Rating: - A man tortured
After the breakup of the Beatles, George Harrison kept going with his beloved Indian music (All Things Must Pass), Paul McCartney kept on with his lightweight pop (McCartney), and Ringo Starr stayed with his twangy country (Beacoups of Blues). But John Lennon beat them all with his 1970 release John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.Envisioned as a companion piece to his wife's Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band album (whatever happened to THAT?), the album was written and recorded at the height of John's fascination with Primal Scream therapy under the direction of a new "daddy" figure to Lennon, Arthur Janov. It involved screaming and yelling and going, basically, crazy in order to release all your pain. The lyrics, bare-boned and straightforward but hard-hitting as ever, pierce like knives in the ear of the listener. You just want to reach out and give John a hug. The strains of a funeral bell tolling for Julia Lennon Dykins, John's mother who died when he was 15, opens the melancholy but often riveting album, revealing John's torture about his mother's death and father's disappearance: "Mother / you had me / but I never had you... Father / you left me / but I never left you." The fourth track, the classic "Working Class Hero," seemingly attacks yet another member of Lennon's family, his Aunt Mimi. "They hurt you at home / and they hit you at school / they hate if you're clever / and they despise a fool" show John's obvious discontentment with the rigid English class system of his childhood. "God" shows his lost position with religion since leaving the Maharishi a disillusion pupil. The underrated song of the album, though, is "Isolation," a rant on the horrors of celebrity. And while the topic has become trite and overdone over the years, Lennon's haunting vocals propel the song into the upper echelon of songs about the troubling topic with the opening line "People think we've got it made / don't they know we're so afraid / isolation." Isolation indeed.
Rating:  - I was the Walrus, but now I am John
John Lennon was so aggravated with the perfectionism demanded for Beatles albums that he recorded three LPs of loud screams, random noises and tape loops as side projects in the late sixties. These experimental collaborations with avant-garde artist and future wife, Yuko Ono, made "Revolution 9" sound like "Love Me Do." On his first post-Beatles album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Lennon composes actual songs, but that does not mean the venting has ceased.Plastic Ono Band is one of the most scathing, disturbing and unashamedly bitter albums in rock history. With a perennially bleak outlook and an incredible wit, Lennon lashes out religion and idealism ("I Found Out"), oppressive social stratification (the chilling and lyrical brilliant "Working Class Hero"), the sixties dream ("God") and even unbottles the emotions from his mother's death and his father's neglect of a young Lennon years ago ("Mother,"). It's a moving tour-de-force that, in a way, ended the sixties with its declaration of independence from the hippie dream in "God" and could cause envy from today's whinerock bands. Plastic Ono Band stands strong as an emblem of everything grimy, seedy and infuriating about society and popular culture.
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