Amber Coffman

Yoko Ono's catalog isn't easy to navigate or even define at times. Even when John Lennon was on board as a collaborator – band member, producer or cheerleader – her music could be willfully difficult and stubbornly uncommercial. She's a singular artist, maybe more so than her late husband and his famous band, which makes any tribute to her vast recorded work an uphill charge not exactly suited for the easily intimidated. The 14 brave souls who tackle Ono's music on Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono can't truly replicate her distinctive path, and much of the source material hinges on her artist's right to explore those paths via routes of her choosing. In other words, they're not songs in the traditional sense. There have been some interpretable tracks over the years: "Who Has Seen the Wind?," "Listen, the Snow Is Falling" and "Walking on Thin Ice" are close enough to pop music.

This double cd pack is more than a simple anthology. It starts with a complete John Cale-overseen remaster of the long out-of-print 1982 album "Music for a new society", along with 3 exclusive new tracks. But the real meat of the work is M:Fans, a complete reworking of the entire original 1982 album, to which the remastered "Music for a new society" serves merely as preface. "John Cale re-contextualises the original songs into radical new forms to resonate with the digital age. Includes a new recording of 'Back To The End' - a previously lost track from the original session."