ALBUM REVIEW: John Lennon & Yoko Ono - Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions

    John Lennon and Yoko Ono were a new couple when it came to music, and when your partner is possibly the most famous of all The Beatles, you're going to be immediately thrust into the limelight - this is especially guaranteed when the relationship is as eccentric and controversial as that of John and Yoko's, even to this day to a certain extent. This controversial nature of their time together is more than obvious on the infamous cover of Lennon's first collaboration with Yoko Ono, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, depicting the duo completely naked on the cover. You think that's bad? Listen to the album and tell me which is worse. Of course, I always love a good sequel so perhaps Life With the Lions will improve on some of the musical hooks from the previous album that only peaked through on moments like "Two Virgins" or "Two Virgins". Let it be known, Life With the Lions is easily the worst thing John Lennon has ever put his name on - not even the undoubtedly tragic context of this album can excuse it's absolutely appalling nature. If this is indeed life with the lions, than you're being mauled.

    I find context to be pretty important with quite a few records I talk about, especially in tandem with the contents of the record - looking at what and when can often answer the all-encompassing question of why. In this case, much of the album's aggressive or chaotic nature can be directly attributed to tragic incident of John Ono Lennon II, the planned first child of John and Yoko - it was a miscarriage. Of course, not all of the album was recorded in the immediate wake of this personal heartbreak for the couple (one song was recorded in March of 1969, a few months after the November miscarriage), but more than one of the moments on this album capture that immediate and tragic instance - the self-explanatory "Baby's Heartbeat" is a looped infant mortality recording of John Ono Lennon II's actual heart palpitations, recorded by the duo and repeated for around 5 minutes, immediately followed by the "Two Minutes Silence". It's hard not to see as a "moment of silence" for the loss of their child. Even with the tragic context, though, part of me thinks that it's too personal to hear - clearly John and Yoko didn't feel similarly, but it does make for what is, at best, an unsettling nature to these moments.

    Still, that's better than outright annoyance or ear-grate, and Life With the Lions does carry that classic mold. "Cambridge 1969", the 26-and-a-half minute disaster that takes up all of the album's first half, is nothing but John Lennon masturbatory fiddling with guitar feedback while Yoko does her potentially copyrightable wails over it all. Is it fair to call this a song? Is it more art-piece than anything? I don't have the answer for you, but what I can assure you is that "Cambridge 1969" still probably stands as the single worst thing I've ever heard, and I consider that no small feat when I've sat through Metal Machine Music two times. "No Bed For Beatle John" is neither avant-garde nor a particularly interesting tune, loose at best and meandering at worst. "Radio Play", to cap it all off, is pure headache-inducing material which brings out the same kind of primal anger in me as the sound of a chalkboard or the scraping of a dinner plate - it's a truly special kind of awful.

    Every time I relisten to an album, there's usually... SOMETHING I find in its contents that I didn't prior that makes it just slightly better - of course, the opposite happens sometimes, but usually I can appreciate some given aspects of a work with time. Rarely is an album every bit as terrible and horrid as when I first heard it, but Life With the Lions is one of the lucky few where every aspect of it continues to inspire and appall. It fails at being avant-garde, at being conventional, and the only thing it does succeed at is being an uncomfortable listening experience (made even more such with context, if I'm being honest). Life With the Lions continues to be one of the worst, if not the absolute worst, album I think I've ever heard. Only someone like John Lennon could hold the distinction of making both one of the best and one of the worst albums that is immediately in my mind - that's what makes him a genius, after all.

RATING: ✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯

Listen to Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions.