Album reviews: Yoko Ono – Warzone and MØ – Forever Neverland

Yoko Ono – Warzone

★★★☆☆

Yoko Ono’s work has often stood in defiance of the traditional music album. Her latest, Warzone, is no different.

There’s no indication here that anyone is going to pop this on, pour a glass of red wine, and sink into these tracks – but Warzone is performance art you can package and take home. Ono can be invited into your living room to unleash one of her primal screams.

Warzone sees the artist return to, and revamp, a series of tracks from her earlier work, including Starpeace (1985) and Feeling the Space (1973). Although the album has its cacophonous moments (the title track opens with elephants, gunfire, wolves, dogs and possibly a forklift backing up), many of the pieces are surprisingly pared down, with “Where Do We Go From Here” and “Teddy Bear” both driven by Thomas Bartlett’s piano work.

The clear goal with the album is that, by revisiting her past declarations of peace and love, Ono can highlight how little has changed today. It’s moderately effective: yes, there’s a poignancy to how “Woman Power” only needs a Trump reference to feel applicable to today. However, Ono’s continued Flower Power philosophy – “People of America, when will we see?” goes “Now or Never” – feels simplistic at a time when artists are so used to deconstructing the social and political systems that Ono rails against.

And so Warzone falls into a strange dichotomy: as the album closes with a version of “Imagine” that is hymn-like enough to sound like the heralding of a new dawn, the relevance of Ono’s protests feels as if it’s faded. (Clarisse Loughrey)

Mø – Forever Neverland

★★★☆☆

In the four and a half years since she released her debut album, No Mythologies to Follow, MØ has scarcely been out of the charts. First there was the Major Lazer collaboration “Lean On” – for a while the most streamed song of all time – followed by a turn with Justin Bieber on “Cold Water”. Then came a handful of solo singles, “Kamikaze”, “Final Song,” “Don’t Leave” and the criminally underrated ode to messy friendships, “Nights with You”, all supposedly taken from her imminent second album. Except, the second album never came.

“I needed it to be right, in the sound and the concept and everything,” said the Danish pop singer last summer, “I’m such a f***ing perfectionist.” Clearly. It would be another year and a half before an album would finally appear.

It hardly seems relevant, though, to ask whether Forever Neverland was worth the wait. MØ could have probably kept releasing big, untethered electro-pop singles without breathing a word of an accompanying album, and few would have had cause to complain.

Still, an album has arrived – and MØ has chosen to jettison her older singles, consigning them to no-man’s land in favour of new, unfamiliar songs. They follow her tried-and-test formula though: take a tightly coiled instrumental, all clicks, reverb and muffled, minimalist beats, and then unleash that raspy, potent voice – a voice she says is “f***ed up because I smoke too many cigarettes”.

“Blur” has grungy edges to its pop core, and an invigorating, MIA-channelling drop; “Beautiful Wreck” is springy and satisfyingly syncopated, while “Nostalgia” takes the recent trend of strangely misplaced reminiscence (think Anne-Marie’s “2002”, or Charli XCX’s frankly abominable “1999”) and does it right.

Forever Neverland is chock full of safely idiosyncratic bangers, and never misses a beat. But maybe it could have done with missing a few.

“I’ve always felt like, ‘F***, is the world going to understand this weird thing?” MØ once said of her music. It almost feels a shame, then, that Forever Neverland – consistently solid and eminently listenable though it may be – isn’t actually very weird at all. (Alexandra Pollard)