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It's easy to see John Lennon around the time of "Plastic Ono Band" (1970) as an angry, thirty year old lashing out like an adolescent at those whom he believed had let him down, but his creative energy was at such an intense point that the resulting work transformed that anger into something surprisingly mature; Paul's breakup album ("McCartney") is equal parts pretty, well-constructed pop and boring filler, while George's ("All Things Must Pass") is a clearinghouse for an excellent barrel-full of sometimes very spiritual songs he was unable to air while still a member of The Beatles. John's breakup album, though, is by turns tormented, bitter, iconoclastic and tender, but overall unrelentingly confessional, probably the closest thing in rock music to Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" poems: sharp, brutal and personal, yet profoundly universal on the whole. To be fair, some of this can be melodramatic stuff. The funeral bells tolling at the beginning of "Mother" are a heavy-handed opening, but the songs on this album arguably warrant that kind of introduction: this isn't going to be an easy ride, and you should know what you're getting yourself into. Borne of primal therapy, a number of these compositions address elemental human issues ("Mother," "Love," "Isolation," "God") in such a simple, straightforward manner that it's easy to see something of ourselves in Lennon's observations. "Love" may, in fact, be the last word on that particular subject, stripping away the complexities that emotion arouses to reveal the essence of the little engine that governs us all. And, while it may seem a very 1960s notion, "Love" may also be the keynote song here: its presence and its lack inform every other piece of music on the album, from the sense of abandonment in "Mother" to the cultural rebuke of "Working Class Hero," a deadpan folk song (in the most literal sense of that term) that frankly sums up the absurdity of trying to adhere to constantly shifting social values. "I Found Out" covers similar ground as it taps an inner reserve summed up thusly: "No one can harm you, feel your own pain." Finally, whether or not you care when he sings "I don't believe in Beatles" at the climax of "God," it's an unparalleled moment in the history of popular music, one that only Lennon could have managed convincingly, while the wobbly, unaccompanied line "I just believe in me" that follows it reveals a vulnerable hopefulness that is really, genuinely affecting. All of the above paints a bleak picture of this recording, and those listeners who revel in relentless self-flagellation will find much here to their liking. The difference, however, between "Plastic Ono Band" and, say, the nihilism of punk and grunge that followed years later, is that despite the pain laid out in these songs, there is also hope and the acknowledgment that each of us has the strength to carry on. In a world where we have in the past couple of decades been inundated with pop psychology and where it has become commonplace to dismiss a person for having "issues," it is refreshing to realize that the language and music on "Plastic Ono Band" continue to resonate and have not dated a bit. Credit Phil Spector's uncharacteristically restrained production, which leaves the songs as naked as the emotions they describe, and Lennon's heartfelt singing and soon-to-vanish clear-headed writing for making this music age-resistant. A rewarding album worth returning to often.