"Milk and Honey," while well intentioned, is not a great record.
Sometimes artists don't live to see their masterpieces. Other times, it's up to the business managers and friends to assemble a finished product out of the scraps that were lying around. Yet sometimes the passing of an artist completely alters the trajectory of the work, as was the case with 1980's "Double Fantasy," a record that was credited to John Lennon and wife Yoko Ono. Critics viewed Lennon's laid-back portrait of wedded bliss as awfully one-sided, but three weeks after its release, Lennon was murdered, and the outpouring of grief from the world was enough to not only embrace "Double Fantasy" but also give it Grammy for Album of the Year. "Milk and Honey" is basically the leftovers from the same sessions, and Lennon's vocal takes are unpolished, sometimes rambling and often backed by extremely cheap-sounding instrumentation.
Milk And Honey returns to the lost optimism of the past, to a time when John and Yoko were still celebrating the second half of their lives together, rededicated to a shared muse (music) and to one another. Because the songs weren’t completed at the time of John’s death, the vocals sound slightly unfinished, with an echo that some might find slightly unsettling (more than a few pundits speculated that John had risen from the grave for these recordings). Yet the instrumental tracks, finished later, honor the rough quality of the songs, which suggests to the ear that Lennon was simply going after a looser style (as compared to, say, the ungainly collaboration that constituted The Beatles’ “new” songs on their Anthology series).
Per tradition, the songs switch between John and Yoko's vocals almost every other track, but numbers like Yoko's short lament "O' Sanity" and Lennon's mawkish "(Forgive Me) My Little Flower Princess" truly feel tossed off and hazily scrawled, the leftovers from sessions that were already uneven to begin with. In the context of his passing, there is a clear love of Lennon's body of work that helped fuel interest in "Double Fantasy" and "Milk and Honey", but decades removed from its release, we can say that "Milk and Honey," while well intentioned, is not a great record.
Lennon fans will already own this record, as it may be the last essential statement from the man. What followed was product plain and simple, but Milk and Honey is an album that John Lennon presumably wanted his fans to hear. No one would have known his intent as well as Yoko, who proved herself a courageous caretaker of her husband’s works when she saw this through to completion.
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