The first indication that this album is not going to be one in which Yoko Ono avoids confronting reality comes when one looks at the album cover. On the front, two kinds of glass: a glass filled with water, and a pair of glasses - the glasses worn by John Lennon the night he was killed. The photograph is stark, frightening. It will anger many people and make them turn away from this record. It will also draw the daring - those willing to be taken inside, to hear what Yoko Ono has to say just slightly more than six months after her husband was gunned down before her eyes. Those who wish to erase the incident from their minds, and who might consider Ono's frankness offensive - who wish she wouldn't rub it in - are best advised to stay away. But those who don't ever want to forget, who are willing to open up and face this woman's statement, and maybe find something with which to identify will find many emotions on the album. Ono doesn't beat around the bush, doesn't try to forgive and forget - she's a bitter woman. But she is a very strong one. Not all of Season Of Glass deals with Ono's relationship with Lennon or her feelings about his death, but those portions of the record are the most chilling - sometimes it hurts to listen to her pained voice. But it's necessary to hear her go through with this album. It almost serves as an exercise in dealing with life's many brutalities - if she can stand up and carry on, so must we. Hearing Ono sing brings back memories, true, but at the same time it also feels good to know that she's done this. Season Of Glass is not like any other record Ono has been involved with, not like any of her early `70s experimental, avant-garde art recordings. This is a melodic pop album, produced for the most part by Phil Spector until Ono took over on her own. There's very little that's abrasive about the actual music, which is mostly traditional soft rock with backing by many of the musicians who worked with Ono and Lennon on Double Fantasy. There's none of the primal screaming of the old Ono recordings, but in its own way, her voice is just as close to the edge as it was then. In the liner notes she admits that she was "all choked up and my voice was cracking" during the recording of this LP. But then she adds that it's OK for her voice to sound like that because, "That's what the critics have been saying about me all those years anyway.'' From the start of the record, Ono makes her feelings known. "Goodbye Sadness" is an emotional tune in which Ono sounds as if she's started to come to terms with her fears and sadness because she "can't take it anymore. On that song and the next, "Mindweaver," Ono is heard speaking on the phone, presumably to Lennon. The conversation could have taken place during the period when the couple separated for a while, and the lyrics indicate that perhaps she's feeling the same loneliness and emptiness now that she felt when they went their separate ways. That theme is suggested again several times during the record. At one point, the couple's son Sean is heard speaking, and mentioning his "daddy." It's difficult not to feel the same feelings one felt upon hearing about the murder. The most obvious reference to Lennon's murder occurs during the song "I Don't Know Why," which opens side two. "It was getting so good with us," Ono sings at one point; at another, she repeats the words "You left me/ You left me without words." Then, she screams: "You bastards! Hate us! Hate me! We had everything! You..." and then abruptly stops. It's the most intense, chilling moment on the otherwise calm, collected record. Whether she's shouting directly at Lennon's killer or to the masses who blamed her for the breakup of the Beatles and who condemned her throughout the years that she and Lennon simply wanted to have a peaceful family life together, is up to the listener to decide. But she'll make you think about it. Another blatant reference occurs at the beginning of "No, No, No," when we hear gunshots followed by screams, then a confused sounding voice of Ono singing nervously over a discordant funk guitar and a dance beat. But those incidents are the exceptions. The bulk of Season Of Glass finds Ono making nearly accessible pop and fronting a well-rehearsed band of crack studio musicians. Spector's production does not attempt to turn Ono and band into a huge sounding thing, as was typical of his famous productions of the past. If anything, this is possibly the sparsest recording Spector has ever been involved with. Most of the music is pushed far into the background, allowing Ono's singing to hold its own and create the moods by itself. The music becomes ominous in its thinness, and therefore, under the circumstances, more poignant. The occasional melodic bursts of sax and guitar stick out as islands of sanity to grasp onto in the midst of all of Ono's purposeful tension. It works extremely well and leaves a mark. Yoko Ono always did know how to get her message across.

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