Convincing skeptics that Yoko Ono actually kicks a great deal of ass can be a hard sell: she’s steeped in a world more avant-garde than pop or trad-rock, she often sings like she’s glad her voice annoys the squares, and the “broke up the Beatles” scapegoat rep is probably going to outlive us all. But while an unwieldy double LP might not be the easiest route to appreciating her as a whole, Approximately Infinite Universe — recorded with the same band, Elephant’s Memory, that backed some of John and Yoko’s most polarizing and political work — is riddled with moments that make her out to be as multifaceted and open to the paradox of serious absurdity as her 1960s conceptual art did. The music’s more accessible than her rep in part because it’s there to give her more directly radical ideas a clear immediacy — which, in the service of an overarchingly feminist and liberatory philosophy, was damn near a must. As a performer, she thrives off a bitter-from-experience frustration and a guarded hope for something better, backed by a band that alternately emphasizes the serrated sharpness behind her words (peaking early with the supremely irritated powerman-dismantling opener “Yang Yang”) and gives it a sardonic charge (dig the hilarious archness of writing a song as run through with existential and familial alienation as “I Felt Like Smashing My Face in a Clear Glass Window” and arranging it as a ’50s-redolent goodtime boogie-rock pastiche). And while the rockers are appealingly playful — see also: the I Can Turn You Loose difference-split “Move on Fast” and the title cut busting simultaneously busting open girl-group pop and enka — it wouldn’t hit quite as hard without also giving voice to Ono in ballad mode, facing down an inextricable loneliness both emotionally and societally in cuts like “What a Bastard the World Is” and “Looking Over from My Hotel Window” that give explicitly feminist text to the once-subtextual world of the wronged-woman song. And across the board, the way Ono concocts lyrics that are simultaneously matter-of-fact blunt, ineffably poetic, koan-deep and cartoon-silly makes Approximately Infinite Universe one of the decade’s most unusual yet resonant bodies of songwriting.

– Nate Patrin