WARZONE
In her 85 years, Yoko Ono has played the pioneer of the primal scream, the icy avant-disco diva, the abstract poetess of peace, and many other challenging roles. She’s also a consummate rebel who refuses to become creatively complacent or remain silent about the world’s ills. Ono’s last major project, the two volumes of *Yes, I’m A Witch*, invited younger fans like Cat Power and Tune-Yards to help reinvent her songbook. *Warzone* is another radical act of re-creation, taking 13 songs from across her career and revamping them in startling ways. Just compare the original 1970 version of “Why,” featuring John Lennon’s thrashing proto-punk guitar, with this new take in which Ono shrieks into an unsettling void. Expressly political, *Warzone*, Ono’s 14th proper studio album, ranks as one of her most difficult listens, full of eerie ambiance, off-kilter arrangements, and scalding vocals. But it’s playfully experimental, too, especially in its lighter second half, which features the giddy, grooving “Children Power” and the blunt-but-beautiful “I Love You Earth.”
Following twenty albums over 50 years, Yoko Ono’s Warzone is strikingly different from any record she has made previously, but it is also strikingly different from any album that anyone is making... Yoko revisits and reimagines 13 songs from her past work, spanning 1970-2009, the lyrics and messages still pertinent—perhaps even more pertinent—in 2018.
An endurance of idealism threads together these 13 reimagined protest songs, collected from four decades of albums. But their tempered presentation reveals a profound generational disconnect.
The clear goal is that, by revisiting her past declarations of peace and love, Ono can highlight how little has changed today. Meanwhile Danish pop star MØ fills her second record with safely idiosyncratic bangers
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On Warzone 13 songs from Yoko Ono's back catalogue are reimagined with the greatest care and dedication offering a sensitivity that is needed in our world now as much as ever.
Warzone finds Yoko Ono revisiting her work from 1970 through 2009. While these 13 tracks are new versions of early highlights, they sound like fresh statements, with lyrics that are as strikingly relevant as ever.
Now 85 years old, Yoko Ono has been reinterpreting her considerable catalogue (twenty albums and counting) since at least the early 00s. Startlingly, she
Yoko Ono is all over the place while bringing her most intriguing work in her subdued tracks in our review of the dark 'Warzone'
Ono rages through an album that is part rehabilitation of 1985’s Starpeace, part call to arms – and wholly unique
Yoko revisits her back catalogue but doesn’t make it any more appealing. Review by Guy Oddy